Legislative Session
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will resume consideration of H.J. Res. 24, which the clerk will report.
The senior assistant executive clerk read as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
Mr. President, today, Senator Shaheen of New Hampshire and I are introducing a resolution. That resolution recognizes April as Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month.
Far too many Americans have suffered as a result of this terrible crime. Sexual violence doesn't discriminate. Statistics show that two in five women and one in four men will experience sexual assault sometime throughout their life, and yet those numbers can't capture the pain, the fear, and the lifelong impact that survivors endure.
We must ensure that these brave survivors know that they are not alone. That means expanding resources for survivors, holding criminals accountable, and fostering a culture where no one suffers in silence or shame.
So Senator Shaheen and I urge our colleagues to recommit to this cause, not just for this 1 month out of 12 but every day of the year. To survivors of sexual assault, we see you, we stand with you, and we will not stop fighting for you.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
(The remarks of Ms. Cantwell pertaining to the introduction of S. 1272 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
Mr. President, as early as today, we expect to take up a budget resolution that will lay the groundwork for delivering on the Republican agenda. This resolution is the first step toward a final bill to make permanent the tax relief we implemented in 2017
And at the prospect of this, Democrats are losing their minds. Their opposition to the 2017 tax relief, of course, is well known. Since the day the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed, and before, Democrats have attempted to mischaracterize--and some would say flatout lie--about this legislation.
In fact, the Washington Post Fact Checker has repeatedly issued three- and four-Pinocchio responses to Democrats' claims, which center around the falsehood that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was about handouts to corporations and billionaires.
The truth, of course, is not only did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut taxes for every income group, but it was working families--working families--not the wealthy, who received the greatest proportional benefit.
Let me just repeat that: The truth is that not only did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut tax rates for every income group, but it was working families, and not the wealthy, who received the greatest proportional benefit. Those are the facts.
But, of course, the facts have not gotten in the way of Democrats continuing to claim that extending this tax relief is about handouts to billionaires.
The Democrats' latest hysteria is centered around the application of budget rules we will use for this week's budget resolution. They claim that using current policy baseline is somehow destroying Senate rules, even though the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, which governs this budget resolution, clearly states that it is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee who determines the budget baseline used for budget resolutions.
The senior Senator from Vermont, who caucuses with the Democrats, confirmed that it is the chairman's role in a 2022 report when he was chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. And, of course, Democrats themselves have previously advocated for the use of a current policy baseline. They basically invented it back in 1977, shortly after the Budget Act was enacted.
Chairman Muskie, a Democrat from Maine and chairman of the Budget Committee, used a current policy baseline in his budget resolution because he thought it represented a more realistic benchmark.
More recently, President Obama's fiscal year 2013 budget assumed $4.5 trillion of expiring tax cuts would be extended in the Democrat's baseline, matching current policy at the time.
Jump forward to the Biden administration's most recent budget, in which Democrats explained that:
So using the current policy baseline is not some bizarre new gimmick.
I should also note, of course, that the Senate Parliamentarian has deemed the Senate budget resolution, which uses the current policy baseline, in order and ready for floor consideration.
Democrats' sudden concern for saving money and protecting the character of the Senate is touching. Who would have guessed that the party that was so eager to tear down a fundamental Senate institution, mere months ago, by killing the Senate filibuster would suddenly develop such a passionate interest in defending the character of the Senate?
But their hysteria is misplaced.
I do understand that Democrats are uncomfortable with the idea of tax relief. When you think that government knows best and when your enthusiasm for new government programs is virtually unlimited, it is no surprise you would prefer to maximize the flow of taxpayer dollars to the government.
But Republicans believe, fundamentally, that Americans know best what to do with their money.
And so no matter how many times Democrats attempt to distort or outright lie about what we are trying to do here, Republicans intend to deliver a permanent extension of the tax relief that we passed in 2017.
Failing to extend this tax relief would result in a $2.6 trillion tax increase on those making less than $400,000 a year, as well as a $600 billion tax increase on small businesses.
A typical family of four making $80,000 a year would end up sending an additional $1,700 to the government next year--$1,700. I am quite sure they have better uses for that money than sending it to Uncle Sam.
I said ``make this tax relief permanent,'' and I do mean permanent. Senate Republicans are united with the President in viewing a temporary extension as unacceptable. Americans should not have to live in fear of a tax hike every few years. And small businesses, including family farms and ranches, like those in my home State of South Dakota, need certainty about the tax outlook so they can plan for the future. Making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent will ensure that Americans' take- home pay does not go down, and it will have significant economic benefits.
The National Federation of Independent Business reports that making the small business section 199A deduction permanent would result in the creation of an additional 1.2 million jobs annually, with that number climbing as the law goes on.
And the Tax Foundation reports that long-run gross domestic product would increase by a substantial 1.1 percent. That means more jobs and more opportunities for American workers and, interestingly enough, increasing Federal revenues, to the tune of about $3 trillion, which is the right way--the right way--by growing the economy.
When the economy is growing and expanding, people are working, they are making money, they are taking realizations, they are paying taxes. And do you know what? Government revenue goes up, not down, which is exactly what we experienced when we passed the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, 8 years ago now.
As I said earlier, it was working families, not the wealthy, who received the greatest proportional benefit from that Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and it is working families, not the wealthy, who will see the greatest proportional benefit for making this tax relief permanent.
We are here to make sure that hard-working Americans have more breathing room, to make sure that our economy is providing them with jobs and opportunities and that they are not facing lower paychecks next year.
I was proud to help draft the 2017 tax relief and put more money in American families' pockets, and I look forward to permanently extending it in the near future.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Democratic leader is recognized.
Mr. President, yesterday, Donald Trump made one of the dumbest decisions he has ever made as President, and that is saying something. The tariffs Donald Trump approved yesterday are far, far worse than we thought. It is the largest tax hike on families since World War II.
Yesterday was not ``Liberation Day''; it was tax day. ``Middle class, pay more taxes,'' Donald Trump is telling you. That is what the day is all about.
This morning, naturally, the markets are plunging. The Dow is down 800 points, and the S&P is already on track for its worst day in years. Donald Trump has singlehandedly created a financial forest fire.
Trump called yesterday ``Liberation Day.'' Nobody was feeling even close to liberated--quite the opposite. American families are learning the hard way that Donald Trump has them right in the middle of a pincer and is squeezing them on both sides.
On the one side, Donald Trump is pushing tariffs that will cost working families an extra $5,000 a year, and by his own admission, he ``could not care less.'' On the other side, Donald Trump is working with Republicans to gut vital programs working families rely on, like Medicaid, Social Security, veterans programs.
So there is a pincer: Trump's tariffs raise costs and pick people's pockets on one side, and Trump's budget and his
Now, there are smart ways to use tariffs, and there are dumb ways to use tariffs. Donald Trump is using tariffs in the dumbest way imaginable. In fact, Donald Trump slapped tariffs on penguins and not on Putin. Trump sanctioned the Heard and McDonald Islands, only inhabited by penguins. That is what happens when you don't have a clue as to what you are doing. You fire air traffic controllers, dismantle disease-outbreak monitoring, sabotage Social Security and VA operations, censor climate data, defund public schools, and declare a trade war on penguins.
What is going on? Prices on groceries, prices on electronics, appliances, metal, beer, furniture, fertilizer, and so much more will go up. People's retirements are in peril as markets are in turmoil across the globe. And Donald Trump says, ``I couldn't care less.'' That is his quote, America. You are getting squeezed on both sides by his tariffs and his budget, and he says, ``I couldn't care less.''
The American people are learning quickly that Donald Trump is breaking all the promises he made in the campaign and he is not on their side. He couldn't care less. It is truly unbelievable to watch the sheer destruction Republicans are inflicting on Americans.
We aren't even 100 days into President Trump's second term, and the Republicans this week will plow ahead to take away people's Medicaid. They are letting Elon Musk sabotage Social Security. He says it is a Ponzi scheme. He says he is OK if it is eliminated. What do these rich people know about how middle-class people struggle? It is a little coterie of billionaires that is running policy.
As I said, the middle class is getting squeezed by the pincers on both sides.
What are they doing firing tens of thousands of epidemic responders, healthcare workers, food inspectors, abandoning veterans? And now, on top of all of that--it has been bad enough before ``Liberation Day,'' which is tax day--Americans are going to pay $5,000 a year through his tariffs. For what? Why are they doing all this? Why would they do all this? Why would they hurt people, so many people in so many ways? Why would they have that pincer squeeze them? I will tell you why. One thing. One reason. Tax breaks for the billionaires. As I said, this is a coterie of billionaires running the government--Trump and Musk and Lutnick and so many others. You heard the net worth of his Cabinet; it is incredible. Cutting taxes for billionaires makes them squeeze the American people. It is utterly disgusting.
President Trump should reverse course on his disastrous tariffs immediately--immediately--or else he risks plunging America into a recession. Some of the leading banks, the leading financial analysts with no ax to grind, have greatly increased the odds that we will have a recession because of what Trump is doing.
What President walks mindlessly into a recession, which means it is harder to get a job, harder to keep a job, harder to pay the bills? What President does that?
So I am calling on the House and Speaker Johnson, given how bad Trump's tariffs are--they now know it--to come back into session and vote on the Senate's bipartisan bill undoing the tariffs on Canada, the bill we passed yesterday with bipartisan support because a few Republicans had the courage of their convictions and voted against the President and for Senator Kaine's very, very timely and needed bill. If the Speaker really cares about the American people and the costs they would bear by these tariffs, he should call back the House and take up the Senate bill immediately.
The American people care about one thing above all--and they care about a lot of things, but at the top of the list is inflation. That is the No. 1 thing on people's minds. We heard that over and over again on last November's election day and ever since. And Donald Trump said in his campaign that he would reduce prices on day one when he got elected. He is doing just the opposite. He is not reducing prices; he is dramatically raising them $5,000 a year on the average American family. And by his own omission, Donald Trump said ``I couldn't care less.''
Mr. President, on the budget, this week, Donald Trump and the Republican Party are hitting Americans with a brutal one-two punch.
On one side, Trump has hit Americans with a massive tax hike through his extremely dumb tariffs. On the other side--they are unfocused, just unfocused. On the other side, Senate Republicans are getting ready to take away vital programs, throw people off Medicaid--all so they can give massive tax breaks to billionaires. It is a brutal Republican pincer move, with American families trapped in the middle.
Trump's tariffs raise costs and pick people's pockets on one side, and Trump's budget cuts are taking away healthcare and benefits and veterans' care on the other side.
If Republicans pass their agenda, 80 million Americans will be at risk of losing coverage. Rural hospitals, community health centers, and nursing homes will be at the risk of closure.
If Republicans proceed this week, Senate Democrats will expose their agenda for the American people to see. We will pick their bill apart. We will put them on record. We will force Republicans to explain in multiple ways again and again and again why they want to cut taxes for the rich at the expense of working people.
Senate Republicans are so hell-bent on cutting taxes for billionaires, they seem ready to detonate the rules of the Senate and break their word to get it done. Republicans spent years preaching about preserving Senate rules and protecting regular order, but now that their billionaire tax cuts are on the line, the rules don't seem to matter for them.
We all know what is going on here. We know. Senate Republicans don't want to admit that their plan to make these tax cuts permanent will add $37 trillion to the debt--$37 trillion. That more than doubles the totality of our national debt today--more than doubles it. It is reckless, and it is dangerous.
So Republicans in essence want to pretend like their trillion-dollar tax cuts are free, like magic, or, as Chip Roy, one of the most conservative Republicans around here, said, like ``fairy dust.'' A middle school math student could tell you this is ridiculous.
House Republicans must tread carefully. I say that to them over there, particularly the ones on the hard right. If they go along with this dangerous gimmick hatched by Senate Republicans, they will pave the way to add $37 trillion to the debt. Republicans will forever incinerate any credibility they have to complain about debt and deficits.
When you go home, Senate Republicans, don't tell your constituents that you want to cut the debt--$37 trillion. And far worse than that, these billionaire tax breaks and the gargantuan deficit that they will create will haunt our children and our grandchildren with sky-high interest rates, a hobbled economy, and rampant inequality. It is not the world I want my grandchildren to grow up in.
House Republicans must not go along with this dangerous plan by Senate Republicans.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, we are in the process of reaching a conclusion in debating at least the first step--maybe now the second step--of reconciliation. It is an opportunity for us to make the Tax Code more permanent, an opportunity for us to reduce spending and to hopefully get the budget better in balance to bring our debt under control.
But, today, I just want to highlight a small portion of what this debate ultimately will consider, and that is the issue of Medicaid.
As does the Presiding Officer, I come from a very rural State. Medicaid is a component of how we provide healthcare to low-income individuals and how we care for and provide medical treatment for those with disabilities. I want to highlight from my own
As this conversation and debate continue, I want to make certain that my colleagues know, in my view, the value of making certain we do no harm to those in desperate need of healthcare in Kansas and across the country. I am certain--perhaps without a doubt--there are flaws in the system and that abuse occurs, and our focus should be on eliminating those flaws and that abuse.
I want to also talk about another aspect of Medicaid funding. A lot of what I have worked on as a U.S. Senator and before that as a Member of the House of Representatives is trying to make certain that rural America--rural Kansas in particular--has a future and that the community that I grew up in--now with a population of less than 2,000-- has a future and an opportunity for people to come there, live there, raise their families there, educate their children there, and to retire there. Rural America is hugely important to me and, in my view, is hugely important to the country.
One of the challenges we face in rural Kansas and in Kansas generally is having access to healthcare. Our community hospitals are hugely important. Our ability to maintain those hospitals and keep their doors open is a major priority for me. During COVID, we took extraordinary steps to make sure we didn't lose a healthcare provider and that the citizens of Kansas and the country could access healthcare.
One of the components that pays for that healthcare is Medicaid. It is not the hugest component. Medicare, private insurance, other sources, and private pay are utilized for the hospitals to generate the revenue to be able to keep their doors open. This keeping of hospital doors open matters.
As I stated, my goal is making sure that rural communities have a future, but that future disappears in the absence of having access to healthcare. So a significant portion of that effort of mine to preserve, protect, and defend rural Kansas--and our State generally is rural--is to make sure the hospitals have the capability and the revenues necessary to provide the services the community needs. Medicaid is a component of that. Nine percent of hospital revenues come from Medicaid. It is also true that Medicaid only covers 65 percent of the costs of the healthcare provided to someone who receives Medicaid benefits.
The average operating margin for a Kansas hospital is a negative 7 percent, meaning that the revenues don't cover the costs, and there is $1.1 billion in uncompensated care. In other words, the hospitals of Kansas, our healthcare providers, have a shortfall. They take in a certain amount of revenue, but that revenue is $1.1 billion for uncompensated care. That revenue doesn't exist.
Eight hospitals have closed in our State since 2015. I have visited every hospital in Kansas--most of them numerous times. I have talked to hospital administrators and patients and board members and the CFO.
I know one of my standard questions is often: So, are you in the red or the black?
The most common answer to that question is: Well, it depends on what day you ask.
My point in making these statements is that as we debate reconciliation and as we debate the instructions--in the case of the House, instructions to the Energy and Commerce Committee, and in the Senate, instructions to the Finance Committee--those instructions in the bill that we are considering right now are significantly different. The instructions to the House Energy and Commerce Committee are to cut $888 billion from Medicaid. The instructions to the Senate Finance Committee are to cut $1 billion. Now, in both of these circumstances, these are minimum amounts.
But I wanted my constituents to know that, in my view, before this product is concluded, before this legislative endeavor is concluded and we have sent the instructions to the committees and the bills come back from the committees, I want to make sure that we take into account the importance--the importance--of people who are low-income and have disabilities and the importance of Medicaid to them but also the broader issue of what it means to a community to lose its hospital. Often, that hospital is the largest employer in communities across Kansas. That is a component.
The reality is that our citizens move away. If you are a young family and you are looking for a place to live or you are a young family who has grown up in a community in the absence of access to healthcare--and it is broader than just hospitals. It is the hospital; it is the nursing home; it is the community pharmacist; it is the physician; it is the nurse practitioner; it is the chiropractor; it is the optometrist. All of those individuals and their professions matter as to whether or not communities across my State will be around for time to come.
I want to highlight this issue today because the process is beginning that will set the stage for whether or not the future is bright for individuals and the communities in which they live in Kansas and across the country.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority whip.
Mr. President, I just listened to my colleague from Kansas. It is just commendable, the example he has set of going and visiting absolutely every single one of the hospitals in the State of Kansas. It is an example for all of us to get out and talk to our constituents and listen to what they have to say. The senior Senator from Kansas has, I think, set an example for all of us. He visits every county in his State repeatedly, yearly, and it is a model for all. So I am happy to hear him address these issues in this body this morning.
Mr. President, I also heard speak the Senator from New York, Senator Schumer, and what I heard him do is something different. What he did is he mischaracterized a budget term called the ``current policy baseline.''
First and foremost, the Budget Committee has consulted with the Senate Parliamentarian on the substitute amendment that we are bringing to the Senate today. The Parliamentarian has deemed it appropriate for consideration under the Congressional Budget Act. The Budget Act is also clear. The Budget Committee chairman decides the baseline.
I served in this body when it was the Democrats who were arguing in favor of the current policy baseline. That was in 2013 when President Barack Obama was in the White House. The Obama administration and the Senate Democrat majority at the time argued that a current policy baseline was the ``appropriate reference point'' when it extended existing tax policy. Senate Republicans are simply following the law and the standard that the Obama administration wanted followed in 2013.
The current policy baseline is how we make the tax cuts permanent. It is how we stop a $4 trillion tax increase--a tax increase supported unanimously by today's Senate Democrats because, for the Senate Democrats, their favorite day is coming soon: tax day, April 15.
Millions of Americans today are filling out their tax forms, and people are going to spend time this weekend trying to get it right. As they do, I ask myself and wonder if these people who are working so hard at home--hard-working people, earning money, and having to fill out their tax forms--if they realize that Democrats right here in the U.S. Senate want to raise those taxes by a cumulative number of $4 trillion.
Look, a $4 trillion tax increase on American families would be devastating. Senate Republicans are fighting against it. Republicans want to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent. We want to reverse the Democrat failures of the past 4 years. We are focusing on getting America back on track.
Let's look at the tax cuts that occurred a number of years ago. Tax reform restored fairness and simplicity to the Tax Code. Americans are better off because of it. It is one of the things that resulted in the best economic times of my life.
Within 2 years of passing the tax cuts, the United States added millions and millions of new jobs. Unemployment fell dramatically to its lowest point in 50 years. Many businesses grew and invested. Most importantly--most importantly--hard-working Americans had more money in their pockets to spend.
In Wyoming, I heard of one local business owner who used the tax cuts
Ninety percent of Americans saw their taxes go down because of tax reform. It would be disastrous if the tax-and-spend Senate Democrats-- those who brought us the highest inflation in our lifetime--were to choke off the chance for Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. American families would see their taxes go up if the Democrats get their way. Twenty million businesses would see their taxes go up if Democrats get their way. Six million jobs and $540 billion in wages could be erased if Democrats get their way. In all, families, workers, and job creators are facing a $4 trillion tax increase.
When Republicans passed this Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Speaker Nancy Pelosi--she was Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, from California--famously dismissed the savings and the bonuses and the benefits. She said that these wins for workers--she described them as ``crumbs.'' Democrats continue to dismiss the burden of higher taxes.
Listen to what Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said. She said that cutting taxes was nothing more than ``tossing a few crumbs'' at the American people.
Listen to what Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said. He blamed workers who received bonuses from tax reform for ``driving up the debt.'' I don't recall him saying that in his last 25 hours on the floor of the Senate. He didn't repeat it again.
Democrats are out of touch with America's families. That is what is happening here. It has been proven by the results of the November election, and their condescending liberal attitude is a threat to the American dream. They just think they know better than everybody else.
It is wrong for Democrats to force hard-working taxpayers to pay for wasteful Washington spending. Fortunately for the hard-working taxpayers of this country, President Trump is in the White House, Senate Republicans are in the majority, and common sense is coming to Washington. Senate Republicans are going to continue to put an end to this wasteful Washington spending because we stand with the American workers, with the job creators, and with the small businesses of this country. Hard-working taxpayers are soon going to see where each and every Senator stands.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to complete my remarks prior to the scheduled rollcall vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, today, I rise to urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the motion to invoke cloture on Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is nominated to serve as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.
The CMS Administrator is responsible for overseeing healthcare programs that cover tens of millions of Americans, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP.
At his hearing, Dr. Oz spoke strongly about his desire to modernize the CMS and encourage a healthy lifestyle for all Americans. His vision for treating the underlying causes of chronic disease and equipping providers with innovative technologies to serve patients will also be a much needed sea change at CMS.
I am confident that his years spent as a leading physician and public health advocate make him duly qualified to accomplish these goals, and I look forward to working with him, if confirmed.
Dr. Oz clearly met the standard of the Finance Committee's arduous nomination process, and I thank him for the diligence and accessibility he displayed during the extensive meetings he had with committee members and staff, in addition to responding to hundreds of questions for the record.
I strongly encourage my colleagues to join me in advancing his nomination.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will read the title of the joint resolution for the third time.
The joint resolution was ordered to a third reading and was read the third time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The joint resolution having been read the third time, the question is, Shall the joint resolution pass?
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
I announce that the Senator from Maryland (Ms. Alsobrooks), the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons), the Senator from Oregon (Mr. Merkley), and the Senator from Washington (Mrs. Murray) are necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 53, nays 42, as follows:
The joint resolution (H.J. Res. 24) was passed.
Motions to Discharge: S.j. RES. 33 and S.J. RES. 26
Pursuant to section 36(b) of the Arms Export Control Act, I move to discharge the Committee on Foreign Relations from further consideration of S.J. Res. 33 and S.J. Res. 26 relating to the disapproval of the proposed foreign military sales to the Government of Israel of certain defense articles and services.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the titles.
The senior assistant executive clerk read as follows:
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate debate the motions concurrently with all other provisions from yesterday's order remaining in effect.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, let me begin by telling the American people something that they already know, and that is, as a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, we now have a corrupt campaign finance system that allows billionaires to buy elections and to influence major pieces of legislation. That, I think, is not a secret to the American people.
If you are a Republican and you vote against the Trump-Musk administration in one way or another, you have got to look over your shoulder and worry that you are going to get a call from Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, and he will tell you that if you vote against what he wants, he will spend unlimited amounts of money to defeat you in the next election. That is not a great secret. That is what Musk has been saying publicly.
If you are a Democrat, you have to worry about the billionaires who fund AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. If you vote against Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his horrific war in Gaza, AIPAC will punish you with millions of dollars in advertisements and other ways to see that you are defeated.
AIPAC's PAC and super PAC spent nearly $127 million combined during the 2023-2024 election cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission. And I must confess that AIPAC has been successful. Last year, they defeated two Members of the U.S. House who opposed providing military aid to Netanyahu's extremist government.
Now, given all of that, I would hope that Democrats and Republicans who understand that they were elected to protect the interests of their constituents, not billionaire campaign contributors, would support the ending of Citizens United and would move us toward public funding of elections so billionaires could not continue to control the political and legislative process.
Further, I would hope that both parties would move to end super PAC funding in their primaries, keep the super PAC money, Musk money, AIPAC money out of the Democrat and Republican primaries.
I would hope that that would be the case so that we can, once again, become a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and not a government run by the billionaire class.
Mr. President, I trust that every American and certainly every Member of the Senate understands that Hamas, a terrorist organization, began this terrible war with its barbaric October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages.
The International Criminal Court was correct in indicting the leaders of Hamas as war criminals for those atrocities. Clearly, Israel had the right to defend itself against Hamas.
But most Americans also understand that while Israel had a right to wage war against Hamas, it did not and does not have the right to wage war against the entire Palestinian population, and, tragically, that is exactly what we have seen over the last year and a half.
Let us be clear: Prime Minister Netanyahu's racist and extremist government has waged an all-out, barbaric war against the Palestinian people and made life unlivable in Gaza.
Within Gaza's population of just 2.2 million people, more than 50,000 have been killed and more than 113,000 have been injured, 60 percent of whom are women, children, and elderly people. That is 7.4 percent of the population of Gaza killed or wounded--7.4 percent in a year and a half.
If those same percentages were applied to the United States, in terms of a horrible war where our people were killed or wounded, it would mean that over 25 million Americans would have been killed or wounded.
In total, since this war began, 15,000 children--children--in Gaza have been killed, and today there are some 17,000 orphans. But it is not just the dead and the wounded.
Israel's indiscriminate bombardment has damaged or destroyed two- thirds of all structures in Gaza, including 92 percent of the housing units--as you can see from this photo. Ain't a whole lot left. I don't know why they need any more bombs; they basically destroyed the entire area. Nothing much left to be destroyed.
Almost no part of Gaza has been left unscathed. Most of the population now is living in tents or other makeshift structures. Most of the territory's hospitals and primary healthcare facilities have been bombed, leaving virtually all Gazans without basic medical care at a time when bombs are flying and people are being wounded, and think about what that means. I have met repeatedly with doctors, American doctors and others, who have served in Gaza, and they are treating hundreds of patients a day without electricity, without anesthesia, without clean water, including dozens of children arriving with gunshot wounds to the head. I have seen the photographs and the videos.
Gaza's civilian infrastructure has been totally devastated, including almost 90 percent of water and sanitation facilities. Most of the roads in Gaza have been destroyed or made impassable. Gaza's educational system has been obliterated. Children are not going to school. According to the World Bank, more than 2,000 educational facilities ranging from kindergartens to universities have been destroyed. Hundreds of schools have been bombed, as has every single one of Gaza's 12 universities. There has been no electricity in Gaza for 17 months, no electricity.
Put simply, Netanyahu and his extremist government have killed or wounded over 7 percent of Gaza's population and has turned Gaza into a wasteland unfit for human life. That is what has been going on over the last year and a half.
In terms of where we are today, right now, the Netanyahu government broke the cease-fire 2 weeks ago, endangering the well-being of the remaining hostages held by Hamas.
Further, in the last 2 weeks, they have intensified their assaults against the Palestinian people. According to UNICEF, since Netanyahu broke the cease-fire, more than a thousand people have been killed, including over 300 children, and more than 600 children have been wounded in the last short period of time.
UNICEF says that most of these children were killed while sheltering in makeshift tents or damaged homes. Just in the last 24 hours, 97 more people have been killed in Gaza.
Since Netanyahu broke the cease-fire, even more aid workers, the people whose job it is to try to help people who have been wounded or hurt, more aid workers have been killed, putting the total of over 400--400--aid workers have been killed since the war began.
Earlier this week, the United Nations announced that they have recovered the bodies of 15 emergency aid workers who were killed by Israeli forces while wearing their emergency responder uniforms and then dumped into a mass grave in southern Gaza.
They were buried alongside the destroyed emergency vehicles, clearly marked ambulances, a fire truck, and a U.N. car.
With the resumption of bombing, hundreds of thousands of Gazans are once again being forcibly displaced by bombing and evacuation orders.
This week, Israeli authorities issued displacement orders for most of Rafah, where about 150,000 people were estimated to be sheltering.
Think about what all of this means in human terms. Throughout this war, millions of desperately poor people, the people in Gaza, by and large, are extremely poor. They have been repeatedly driven from their homes. They have been forced to pick their way through a demolished landscape again and again with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
Families have been herded into so-called safe zones, only to face continued bombardment.
The children of Gaza--Mr. President, this is just one picture--have suffered a level of physical and emotional torture that is almost beyond comprehension and that will clearly stay with each and every one of them for the rest of their lives.
These children are hungry. They are thirsty. It is hard to get clean water. They have been denied healthcare. And they have witnessed the death of their parents, their family members, their homes, and virtually everything around them. And they have been picked up and moved from one place to another. All the while, drones are on top of them, shooting or photographing what they are doing.
Throughout this war, Israel's restrictions on humanitarian aid have left hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of children, facing malnutrition and starvation--malnutrition and starvation. Children have literally starved to death while aid just sat a few miles away, blocked by Israeli forces.
The U.N., the United States, and every aid organization working in Gaza has been clear throughout this war: Israel's unreasonable and unnecessary restrictions on humanitarian aid have contributed to massive death and profound suffering.
But as bad as the last year and a half has been, at least Israel let some--some, not enough, but some--aid through. But what is happening right now is unthinkable.
Today, it is 31 days and counting with absolutely no humanitarian aid getting into Gaza--nothing--no food, no water, no medicine, no fuel for over a month. That is a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, the Foreign Assistance Act, and basic human decency.
It is a war crime. You don't starve children. And it is pushing things toward an even deeper catastrophe.
Earlier this week, 25 bakeries supported by the World Food Programme were forced to close because they ran out of flour and cooking gas. The U.N. is still trying to deliver its remaining stocks of food already in Gaza but says ``that the situation remains extremely critical since the cargo closure of the crossings almost a month ago.''
All of this is unconscionable. What we are talking about is a mass atrocity, and what makes it even worse, and why I am here today and why I have introduced the resolutions that we will soon be voting on, is that we, as Americans, are deeply complicit in all that is happening in Gaza.
This is not some terrible event. This is not an earthquake in Myanmar. It is not something that we had nothing to do with. We are deeply complicit in all of this death and suffering.
Last year alone, the United States provided $18 billion in military aid to Israel and delivered more than 50,000 tons of military equipment. It is American bombs and American military equipment that are being used to destroy Gaza, kill 50,000 people, and injure over 110,000 people. We cannot hide from that reality.
If we condone the barbarism that is taking place in Gaza today, we will have no standing in the world to condemn the horrors and war crimes that other countries may commit. You are not going to be able to look at China or Russia or Saudi Arabia or any other country and say: Look, how terrible. Look at what they are doing to the children, to the women, to innocent people.
We will have no credibility because they will come back and say: Really? You are really concerned about what China, Russia, Saudi Arabia may be doing? Hey, take a look at what you supported in Gaza and the billions of dollars in aid you gave to Netanyahu's government.
Today is the day to stand up to barbarism in Gaza and to do our best to prevent future barbaric acts all over the world.
It is no secret to anyone how these U.S. weapons have been used. Israel has bombed indiscriminately, killing civilians, journalists--a whole lot of journalists have been killed--paramedics, children, and humanitarian workers in record numbers. They have used massive 2,000- pound bombs in densely populated Gaza, despite the fact that studies show that 90 percent of victims of explosive weapons used in a populated area are civilians. These bombs have a blast radius of more than 350 meters, yet Israel has dropped them into crowded apartment buildings, killing hundreds of civilians, to take out a handful of Hamas fighters.
All of that is illegal and immoral and against American law.
The Foreign Assistance Act, which is what we are talking about today, and the Arms Export Control Act, what we are talking about today, are very clear. The United States cannot provide weaponry to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block U.S. humanitarian aid.
According to the U.N., much of the international community, and every humanitarian organization on the ground in Gaza, Israel is clearly in violation of these laws. Under these circumstances, it is illegal for the U.S. Government to provide Israel with more offensive weaponry. It is simply against our laws.
Despite all of that, in the last month, the Trump administration has announced its intention to transfer some $12.5 billion more in offensive weapons--not defensive weapons, offensive weapons--to Netanyahu's government, in clear violation of U.S. law. And that is why we are here today.
Joint resolutions of disapproval--which is what we are dealing with right now--are Congress's tool to enforce American law. Today, we will vote on two resolutions to block two of the most egregious of these Trump administration offensive arms sales, which would provide almost $9 billion more in heavy bombs and other munitions to Netanyahu, including more than 35,000--35,000--massive 2,000-pound bombs that have killed so many civilians.
The first resolution, S.J. Res. 33, would block a sale of over $2 billion for 35,000 MK-84 2,000 bombs and 4,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads.
The second resolution, S.J. Res. 26, would block almost $7 billion for 2,800 500-pound bombs, 2,100 small-diameter bombs, and tens of thousands of JDAM guidance kits.
All of these systems have been linked to dozens of illegal airstrikes, including on designated humanitarian sites, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties. These strikes have been painstakingly documented by human rights monitors. There is no debate.
And none of these systems are defensive. None of them are necessary to protect Israel from incoming drone or rocket attacks.
For those of my colleagues who may be ambivalent, not quite sure how they want to vote on these resolutions, let me say a word about how the Trump administration is ignoring the law in advancing these arms sales in terms of the process.
Unlike Biden, whose policies on Gaza I strongly opposed--and I stood right here, at this location, strongly opposing what Biden was doing in terms of military aid to Israel. But unlike Biden, President Trump is trying to circumvent Congress with these transfers, ignoring the Foreign Assistance Act by issuing a bogus emergency declaration--an emergency declaration to bypass congressional review.
There is no emergency to justify cutting Congress out of the process. In fact, some of the systems the Trump administration claims are part of this emergency sale have not yet been produced.
And this is also part of a broader Trump administration effort to cut Congress out of the arms sales process.
It is no great secret that Congress is way out of touch with where the American people are on issue after issue--whether it is the economy, whether it is healthcare, whether it is climate--whatever it may be. Everybody knows. Congress is way out of touch, and the billions of dollars that we are providing to the Netanyahu extremist government is just one more example of how
According to a recent Economist/YouGov poll in March, just 15 percent of the American people support increasing military aid to Israel--15 percent--while 35 percent support decreasing military aid to Israel or stopping it entirely.
To my Democratic colleagues, I would mention that in that same poll, just 8 percent of Democrats support increasing military aid to Israel. And, I think, as Democrats have held town meetings over the last year, they have heard from those people. Eight percent of Democrats support what we are doing now, more military aid for Israel. Forty-seven percent support decreasing military aid to Israel or stopping it entirely--8 percent, increasing, Democrats; 47 percent, decreasing military aid.
Among Republicans, 9 percent are for decreasing military aid and 15 percent for stopping all--24 percent for stopping or decreasing all military aid.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed this poll in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
[From the Economist/YouGov Poll, March 16-18, 2025--1618 U.S. Adult
Totals....................... 99% 100% 101% 101% 100% 100% 100% 99% 99% 100% 99% 101% 100%
Unweighted N................. (1,615) (739) (876) (1,090) (205) (206) (314) (348) (570) (383) (625) (477) (358) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Totals....................... 99% 100% 100% 100% 101% 100% 100% 100% 99% 99% 99% 99% 99%
Unweighted N................. (1,615) (695) (573) (1,455) (505) (494) (506) (554) (591) (470) (718) (290) (607) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Mr. MORENO assumed the Chair.)
Mr. President, according to a J Street poll of Jewish voters in November, 62 percent of American Jews support withholding ``shipments of offensive weapons like 2,000-pound bombs until Prime Minister Netanyahu agrees to an American proposal for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in exchange for a release of Israeli hostages.'' And 71 percent of Jewish voters support increasing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
Finally, as unbelievably horrific as the situation in Gaza is and has been for the last year and a half, there is another development that could make the situation even worse. It is hard to believe. It really is, but it could. In recent months, President Trump and Israeli officials have openly talked about forcing out--forcibly expelling--the 2.2 million people who live in Gaza, pushing them out to make way for what Trump calls a riviera, some billionaire's playground.
Now, I think some people who may be watching this think: This can't be true. You must be kidding. You must be lying. This is inconceivable--pushing 2.2 million desperate people out of where they live to create a playground for billionaires.
But a few years ago, as some may recall, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner said that he felt--Jared Kushner--``Gaza's waterfront property could be very valuable,'' floating the idea of redeveloping it. I think that many people at the time thought that was a weird and terrible joke. But it turns out that his father-in-law, Donald Trump, took it seriously. Here is what Trump has said repeatedly in recent months:
I guess he didn't speak to too many Palestinians who live on that land.
On Truth Social, Trump wrote:
What about the Palestinians who have lived in Gaza for their entire lives? Trump said:
Gaza could become, again, Donald Trump:
Yes, throw 2.2 million people who have suffered incalculably; throw them out of the land in which they live in order to create a billionaire's playground.
There is a name and a term for forcibly expelling people from where they live. It is called ``ethnic cleansing.'' It is illegal. It is a war crime.
Mr. President, the United States must not continue to be complicit in the destruction of the Palestinian people. History will not forgive us for this. The time is long overdue for us to tell the Netanyahu government that we will not provide more weapons of destruction for them. Instead, we must demand an immediate cease-fire, surge in humanitarian aid, the release of the hostages, and the rebuilding of Gaza for the Palestinian people.
For all of these reasons, I urge my colleagues to vote yes on these two resolutions which would prevent illegal and immoral arms sales to Netanyahu, would uphold congressional power and the rule of law, and would protect innocent life.
I will yield to the Senator from Maryland, Senator Van Hollen.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. President, I rise to support the Sanders resolution and to oppose the transfer of over $8 billion of U.S. taxpayer-financed bombs and other offensive weapons to the Netanyahu government as it continues to block all humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, which is a clear violation of international and American law, and as it promotes the reprehensible Trump plan to push 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza.
There is no doubt that Israel has the right to defend itself. In fact, I would argue, the duty to defend itself in the aftermath of the brutal Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, that murdered over 1,200 individuals and took over 250 hostages.
Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization and there must be no more October 7s. This act of terrorism was the worst act of violence and attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust. And that pain endures, especially as not all of the hostages have returned. It has been 544 days, and we must bring home every remaining hostage.
I have met with their families, both here and in Israel, and their emotional pain and anxiety are unbearable. Israeli and Palestinian families across the region face the reality--the brutal reality--of this hostage crisis and the devastation that this war brings every day in Gaza.
Yet through his actions, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist rightwing government have made it very clear that ending the fighting and securing the release of the remaining hostages is not their principal objective. It is very well understood in Israel that Netanyahu's priority is not bringing them home; his priority is own political survival. Like the mother of one of the hostages who was protesting just last week said:
Prime Minister Netanyahu has locked arms with the most extreme elements of his coalition, people like Finance Minister Smotrich and Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir, people who have made their political careers based on inciting hatred against Palestinians, against Arabs, against Muslims. And in Ben-Gvir's case, also associating with groups that espouse the expulsion of Christians. Together, they have readily embraced the twisted, shameful, illegal, and immoral plan advanced by Donald Trump to push 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza.
According to Trump, the United States would ``take over and own Gaza.'' And at least, initially, he didn't rule out using military force to do that.
Netanyahu and the far right in Israel embraced the Trump plan from the start. Prime Minister Netanyahu called it ``remarkable'' and ``the first good idea'' he had heard. On March 30, he said:
Shortly after the Trump plan was announced, Smotrich called it an excellent idea, and he said:
Ben-Gvir echoed that support, noting:
Remember, Ben-Gvir left the cabinet in January because he was opposed to the cease-fire and the return of hostages agreement. Now that Netanyahu has abandoned the cease-fire agreement, Ben-Gvir has returned to the cabinet, again, as Minister of National Security. And listen very carefully to what Netanyahu's Minister of Defense Katz said recently:
He said, referring to the civilian residents of Gaza:
You should listen very carefully to those words because he is threatening the civilian population of Gaza. That is collective punishment, and that is the Trump-Netanyahu plan.
Mr. President, American taxpayers should not be paying for this reprehensible plan. And let me be clear, that is what these bombs and offensive weapons are supporting. It is not about providing for Israel's defense, like Iron Dome, which I have and will continue to support. Instead, these offensive weapons are furthering the extremist goals of Donald Trump and Netanyahu. It surely is not ``America First'' to use billions of dollars of American taxpayer money to pay for bombs and other weapons to facilitate such a grotesque, illegal, and immoral plan.
You know, it is often said that Israel and the United States have a set of shared values that bind us together. Those values have included a belief in democracy, a respect for the rule of law, support for freedom and universal political rights. I believe those remain the shared values between the people of the United States and the people of Israel.
But that cannot be said of either Donald Trump or Netanyahu. They have zero respect for those values. They have a different world view. They both see themselves as above the law. Trump and Netanyahu have both demonstrated an utter contempt for an independent judiciary. Here at home, Donald Trump is calling for the impeachment of judges that uphold the rule of law and illegally bullying law firms and institutions that don't bend to his will. In Israel, Netanyahu and his rightwing government just implemented changes to weaken the independence of the judiciary. And when Trump called for impeaching judges here, this is what Netanyahu said:
Both Trump and Netanyahu have also worked to replace people of independence and integrity with political puppets. Netanyahu is in the process of trying to fire the head of Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, while he was presiding over an investigation into potential financial ties between Netanyahu's office and Qatar.
Here at home, of course, Trump fired the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, installed a completely unqualified Secretary of Defense, and has fired at least 17 independent inspectors general across the Federal Government. Trump and Netanyahu don't believe in checks and balances. They believe in unchecked power for themselves, like other autocrats, Erdogan in Turkey or Orban in Hungary.
Let's be clear that Donald Trump is pursuing policies in Israel that are not pro-Israel. They are pro-Netanyahu and pro-Smotrich and pro- Ben-Gvir.
Donald Trump said on the campaign trail he was going to stop the war in Gaza. He took credit for securing the January cease-fire and the exchange of those hostages at the time. That was phase one--phase 1 of the three-stage framework that the Biden team had negotiated. Prime Minister Netanyahu waited until the eve of Trump's inauguration to begin phase 1 so Donald Trump could claim that success. But ever since then, Trump has backed off and stood back as Netanyahu and his rightwing government resumed the bombing of Gaza, imposed an embargo on humanitarian aid for civilians there, and put the lives of all the remaining hostages at risk.
Indeed, it has now been 32 days since Netanyahu cut off all humanitarian assistance and electricity to civilians in Gaza. That is a blatant direct violation of Israel's duty under both international law and under American law. Indeed, section 620I of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, also known as the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act, prohibits the transfer of any offensive weapons by the United States to any country that fails to ``facilitate and not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.''
Well, for 32 days, we have seen a blockade of humanitarian assistance. It is also a violation of the assurances that the Netanyahu government gave to the United States just last year--which I actually witnessed the signatures--where it said that it would facilitate the delivery of U.S.-supported humanitarian aid in Gaza.
So the Netanyahu government is flouting those commitments. Just this week, the United Nations' World Food Programme, WFB, said all 25 of its bakeries had been shuttered in Gaza. And meanwhile, the Trump administration says nothing and does nothing. What happened to the man who pledged to bring peace to the Middle East?
After cutting off humanitarian aid, the Netanyahu government resumed its bombing campaign in Gaza and unleashed strikes where the initial one killed 430 people in one of the most lethal days of the entire world.
Here is the headline of a March 27 story in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
A surgeon from the United Kingdom who was on the ground said:
We all know that Hamas has no regard for Palestinian civilians and puts civilians in danger. But that does not absolve the Netanyahu Government of the duty to reduce civilian harm, and it is violating that duty. Indeed, as I read, the Minister of Defense has said there will be ``total destruction.''
The death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 50,000, and more than half of those killed are women and children. Palestinian civilians--many of them who recently put themselves at great risk to protest against Hamas--are trapped.
The recent Netanyahu bombing campaign has also taken a severe toll on medical and first aid workers inside Gaza. As the newspaper Haaretz and others have reported, 15 Palestinian paramedics, including a U.N. worker, were killed as they traveled in their ambulances within the last 2 weeks. Jonathan Whittall, the head of OCHA, said the aid workers had been killed ``one by one'' and that the IDF bulldozers then buried them and the ambulances in the sand. To date, over 400 aid workers have been killed since the war started.
Following the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, almost a year ago, the Netanyahu government said they would improve efforts to protect aid workers, but those promises have been forgotten. Just a few days ago, the IDF hit an International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, office in Gaza, and while that strike did not result in casualties, it was another reminder of the Netanyahu government's total disregard for the safety of these humanitarian operators.
Speaking of the ICRC, throughout the war, the Netanyahu government has suspended all humanitarian visits by the ICRC to Palestinian prisoners in both the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and it has yet to resume that access despite reports of the terrible abuses at Sde Teiman. This is a prison. These abuses were revealed by Israel's own security service, Shin Bet, as well as Israel's NGOs and media.
Now, Netanyahu has attacked virtually everyone who questions his conduct in the war in Gaza as pro-Hamas. When his former Defense Minister, Gallant, said that the Israeli military had done all it can in Gaza, he was fired. Netanyahu has even criticized the protests by hostage families, saying that they serve the interests of Hamas-- deplorable.
And the Netanyahu government has tried to punish and sanction Israeli newspapers, specifically Haaretz, which I have been quoting from, for reporting the facts about what is happening in Gaza. In fact, Netanyahu's Communications Minister suggested that the law enforcement in Israel should go after them for ``dangerous incitement by the newspaper,'' as if people cannot be horrified about what happened on October 7, care about the terrible plight of hostages, and care about Palestinian civilians without being pro-Hamas. Of course, claiming that newspapers and his political opponents are aiding and abetting Hamas is a convenient and deeply dishonest rhetorical tactic. It is the same kind of tactic that Trump uses here at home, threatening and sanctioning newspapers that report inconvenient facts.
As we consider how Trump and Netanyahu are pushing forward their plan in Gaza, we should also pay close attention to what is unfolding on the West Bank, where extremist settlers have been fueling violence and destruction. The Biden administration had put in place an Executive order that sanctioned anybody destabilizing the West Bank. It applied to militant Palestinian groups and to extremist Israeli settlers involved in attacks against Palestinians. Trump revoked it. Last week, in the South Hebron Hills, masked settlers attacked Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian filmmaker, who, alongside Israeli director Yuval Abraham, produced the Oscar-winning documentary entitled ``No Other Land.'' The film is about the life and struggles of Palestinians under Israeli occupation in Masafer Yatta, the very place where he was attacked.
Over the last year, we have seen many, many people killed as a result of this violence. You know, if you listen to President Trump's nominee to be our Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, you would think that the expulsion of Palestinians from their land and Israel's occupation is not a problem. When asked during his nomination hearing what would happen if Israel annexed the West Bank and whether Palestinians would have equal rights as Israeli Jews on the West Bank, he couldn't say. He just said, well, Palestinians would have some ``opportunity.''
Let's step back and take stock of where all of this leaves us. As I said at the start, Israel has a right to defend itself. Of course, it does, and the United States will always stand with Israel's right to do so, and the United States has consistently provided Israel with the weapons it needs to defend itself against its many enemies, including Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. But there is a big difference--a very big difference--between providing Israel with the ability to vigorously defend itself and the goals of Trump and Netanyahu, as well as those of Smotrich and Ben Gvir, which are increasingly embracing the goals of building a greater Israel by annexing the West Bank and reoccupying Gaza.
Smotrich and Ben Gvir made no secret of that objective. At a large ultranationalist conference held on the border of Gaza, in October of 2024, Smotrich endorsed the idea of rebuilding settlements in Gaza, stating on his way to the event that the strip was ``part of the land of Israel'' and that ``without settlements, there is no security.''
It is very clear that Netanyahu has hitched his political survival to Smotrich and his whim, and Trump's calls for the displacement of over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza only plays further into their hands.
Just yesterday, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Katz announced that Israel would, as Defense Minister Katz said, ``seize large areas'' of the Gaza Strip. The response of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents most of the hostages' families, was swift and clear. They said they were horrified by Katz' statement and asked:
And yet Trump continues to stand with the extremist Netanyahu government and his own reprehensible plan and calls upon American taxpayers to spend billions of dollars to support that plan.
Israel is now operating as the undisputed superpower in the Middle East. It is a nuclear power. Hezbollah is on its back foot. Iran's air defenses have been severely degraded. Assad is, thankfully, out of power in Syria, and Israel has destroyed much of Syria's military infrastructure. So the question is, What does Israel want to do with this power? What are its long-term goals?
The answer from Smotrich and Ben Gvir is to build a greater Israel, one that demolishes the possibility of a future two-state solution, and Netanyahu is in their corner. The annexation of the West Bank and the reoccupation of Gaza will not make Israel safer. To the contrary, it will condemn it to perpetual conflict. The only sustainable way forward is to ensure that the 5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who have nothing to do with Hamas can live with dignity and have their human rights respected. That is the only way to ensure the long-term security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. That is the only way, colleagues, to prevent the United States from being dragged into permanent conflicts in the Middle East, and that should be painfully obvious to anyone who has followed the history of this region.
I will close where I started. This is not about whether someone is pro-Israel. I believe you can be pro-Israel and anti-the policies of Netanyahu, just as you can be pro-America and oppose the policies of Donald Trump, and that is what this is all about. This is about whether you support the approach that Netanyahu and Trump are taking at this time: Trump's vision of a Gaza cleansed of its Palestinian population and Netanyahu's, Smotrich's, and Ben Gvir's vision of a greater Israel without basic human and political rights for Palestinians.
I will not support that future. I will not vote to support American taxpayer dollars to advance that future. It is not in America's interest nor is it in the interest of Israelis, Palestinians, or anyone else who lives in the Middle East.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes and Senator Risch for up to 5 minutes prior to the scheduled rollcall votes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Mr. President, I rise today and come here to strongly oppose the two resolutions before the Senate at this moment.
These misguided resolutions, if adopted, would reinstate the failed policies of the Biden administration. Worse, they would abandon Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East, during a pivotal moment for global security.
For years, President Biden wrung his hands and withheld American support for Israel in its time of need. This inaction only prolonged suffering for all sides and put America's commitment in doubt. Despite this, Israel had the courage to confront Iran and its proxies, and it decimated them.
Through President Trump's tough negotiations and Israel's courage, Iran is at its weakest point in decades, and hostages are returning home.
At the same time, Israel is contending with its operations against Hamas, efforts to maintain a fragile cease-fire in Lebanon, and the ongoing threats to Iran.
Now is not the time to deprive our ally of the tools it needs to protect American interests.
I yield to Senator Sanders.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, I think Senator Risch and I live in parallel universes. The universe that I live in is a universe which says, yes, of course Israel has a right to defend itself against the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023. No one debates that. But Israel did not and does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people, in violation of international and U.S. law.
It doesn't matter in one sense whether you don't care that 50,000 people in Gaza have been killed or 112,000 women--you don't care about that? Fine. But you should care about American law. What the Foreign Assistance Act says is that the United States cannot provide military assistance to a country which is in violation of U.S. and international law.
When you starve children, you are in violation of international law.
When you have a blockade that does not allow any humanitarian aid to come into a desperate situation for 31 days, you are in violation of international law.
When you kill 15,000 children and bring about malnutrition and starvation for even more, you are in violation of international law.
What is going on right now is not some abstract horror show. We are complicit. Those are our bombs that have destroyed or damaged 92 percent of the housing in Gaza, our bombs which have destroyed hundreds and hundreds of schools in Gaza, our bombs which have attacked every single one of the 12 universities in Gaza.
What we are standing here today discussing is not just Gaza. If the United States remains complicit in this war, we are telling every other country in the world that international law and human rights are meaningless. You could do whatever you want, and no President will ever be able to condemn any other country for their inhumanity. That is what is at stake today. Do we try to maintain a shred of moral integrity in the world or do we simply say to Netanyahu: Here are some more bombs. Kill some more kids. Kill some more women. Bomb some more hospitals.
Is that what we do?
With that, I would yield to the Senator from Maryland, Mr. Van Hollen.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Vermont.
Can I inquire how much time remains?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Five minutes and 45 seconds.
All right.
Listen, I want to emphasize a couple of key points that the Senator from Vermont made.
First of all, as we all know, Israel not only has the duty and the right to defend itself, but it has to make sure that this never happens again.
But I did not hear the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee respond to the key points the Senator from Vermont and I have been making--No. 1, that what is happening right now is a clear violation of American law.
Even if you want to throw international law out the window--and, in my view, we do that at our great jeopardy because the United States has many times invoked international law to advance what we consider to be important rights and interests--it is a violation of the plain meaning of U.S. law because under 620I of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, also known as the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act, offensive sales to any country that is preventing the delivery of U.S.-supported humanitarian assistance is not allowed. It says very plainly that we should not transfer any offensive weapons to a country if they are not facilitating and if they are arbitrarily denying and restricting or otherwise impeding directly or indirectly the transfer of humanitarian assistance.
It is indisputable here that for 32 days, all humanitarian assistance to the civilian population in Gaza has been cut off. I haven't heard a response to how that is not a violation of U.S. law.
Beyond that, it was just last year that the Netanyahu government provided the U.S. Government with written assurances that they would allow the delivery of humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Apparently, it doesn't matter anymore because Donald Trump is in the White House, which, of course, brings us to the other point which both the Senator from Vermont and I have emphasized--that the extreme right in Israel has been emboldened even further by the comments made by Donald Trump-- the Donald Trump comments that we would essentially push 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza. That has been cheered on by extremists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and now adopted and embraced by Netanyahu and his government.
I don't think the American people want to use their taxpayer dollars to supply bombs and other offensive weapons to support that twisted, illegal, and immoral vision of clearing Gaza of 2 million Palestinians.
Yet, as I quoted earlier in my remarks, just today--check it out in the Washington Post and other newspapers--Israel is saying they are going to seize more land in Gaza. The families of the hostages have said that is a really bad idea. Focus on ending the war and getting every hostage returned. That is what we should be focused on.
That is why I support the Sanders resolution, and I oppose spending $8 billion on bombs and other offensive weapons to support the Netanyahu-Ben-Gvir-Trump vision, which is a terrible future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, I thank Senator Van Hollen for his extraordinary efforts today and for over a long period of time standing up for justice and morality in the Middle East.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Has all time expired except for the time I have left?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. No. The other side has 2 minutes.
Mr. President, first of all, I agree with one and only one thing that my friend from Vermont said, and that is that we do live--at least think--in an alternate, parallel universe.
I am on the Intelligence Committee. I am the most senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee. I have seen the film from what Hamas did on October 7. These were animals. They killed hundreds and hundreds of people. They took hostages. They cut babies out of their mothers. They killed children in
They knew exactly what they were doing, and that was that they were going to get a response from Israel that would be what it is today.
All of this talk that my friends have laid out in front of us--no one in the world is coming to the support of Hamas--no one--with the exception of some misguided people in this organization.
The Middle East has an opportunity to free itself from Iran's grip, and America will be safer for it. To promote stability in the region and protect our national security, we need to continue to support Israel's successful efforts.
President Trump, Secretary Rubio, and soon-to-be Ambassador Huckabee will work day in and day out to make sure that American interests are protected in Israel, and Congress must do its part. We really must provide Israel with the force they need to resist and eliminate Hamas.
Just before I walked in here, I was handed an official written position of the President of the United States, who urges us to defeat these two resolutions.
In December, this body overwhelmingly opposed similar resolutions in a bipartisan fashion. I hope we can do that again today. As such, I ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote no on these two resolutions.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, very briefly, nobody is supporting Hamas. Hamas is a disgusting terrorist organization that began the war.
Israel had a right to defend itself against Hamas, but it did not have the right to kill 50,000 Palestinians and wound 112,000, 60 percent of whom are women, children, and the elderly. It did not have a right to bomb every university in Gaza.
As Senator Van Hollen indicated, what we are talking about here is whether or not we support U.S. law. And U.S. law is clear: We cannot supply weapons to a country which is acting in violation of international law. Starving children is a violation of international law.
With that, Mr. President, I would yield the floor and ask for a ``yea'' vote on these resolutions.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the question is on the motion to discharge S.J. Res. 33.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
I announce that the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons) and the Senator from Washington (Mrs. Murray) are necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 15, nays 82, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The yeas are 15, the nays are 82. One Senator responded present. The motion is not agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the question is on the motion to discharge S.J. Res. 26.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second?
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
I announce that the Senator from Washington (Mrs. Murray) is necessarily absent.
The result was announced--yeas 15, nays 83, as follows:
Establishing the Congressional Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2025 and Setting Forth the Appropriate Budgetary Levels for Fiscal Years 2026 Through 2034
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the concurrent resolution.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the concurrent resolution.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that for the duration of H. Con. Res. 14, the budget resolution for fiscal year 2025, the majority and the Democratic managers of the resolution, while seated or standing at the managers' desk, to be permitted to deliver floor remarks, retrieve, review, and edit documents, and send email and other data communications from text displayed on wireless personal assistant devices and tablet devices.
I further ask unanimous consent that the use of calculators--and I know we still have them--be permitted on the floor during consideration of the budget resolution; further, that the staff be permitted to make technical and conforming changes to the resolution, if necessary, consistent with amendments adopted during Senate consideration, including calculating the associated change in the net interest function and incorporating the effect of such adopted amendments on the budgetary aggregates for Federal revenue, the amount by which the Federal revenue should be changed, new budget authority, budget outlays, deficits, public debt, and debt held by the public.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, further, I ask unanimous consent for 2 minutes of debate, equally divided, prior to each vote during consideration of H. Con. Res. 14.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(Purpose: In the nature of a substitute.)
Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 1717.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
Mr. Graham. I ask that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of Amendments.'')
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that for purposes of debate time this evening, that all time be yielded off the resolution.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Democratic leader.
Madam President, a few minutes ago, for the second time this year, Senate Republicans began the process to pass legislation eviscerating Medicaid, abandoning our kids, failing our veterans, and squandering our future--all for the sake of tax cuts for the ultrarich. This is the Republican agenda: Billionaires win; American families lose. Billionaires win; American families lose in the Republican plan.
Republicans have failed to be honest with the country about the true nature of their plans. They have tried to hide their Medicaid cuts. They have tried to hide their billionaire tax giveaways with budgetary gimmicks and distractions. They are tying themselves in knots. They don't want the American people to know what their agenda is. Well, if Republicans won't be straight with the American people about their agenda, Senate Democrats are glad to do it for them.
Tonight, my colleagues and I will begin to put the Republican agenda on trial before the court of public opinion here on the floor of the Senate. It is going to be a long few days for Senate Republicans. Democrats will expose the dark corners of the Republican plan. We will explain the devastating consequences, highlight the many injustices that Republicans will inflict on people's healthcare, on their financial security, on their children's futures, and on the very future of the American dream itself.
We begin tonight with a topic close to home for all of us: Medicaid.
It is my honor to join my fellow Democrats to lay the case before the American people for how Republicans plan to destroy Medicaid as we know it and harm millions and millions and millions of Americans. We will share the stories of people back home. We will illustrate the full scale of the destruction these cuts would do. And we will make it clear to the American people that while Republicans work like hell to eliminate Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich, Democrats are fighting to protect the healthcare the American people deserve and need.
Medicaid will be the first--the first--of six different themes that we will focus on here on the floor.
Tomorrow, we will be focused, likewise, as we debate this bill, on Republicans' morally bankrupt tax breaks for billionaires and on Donald Trump's dumb and costly tariffs, on the need to stand up for our veterans and our national security, on the unprecedented corruption Donald Trump has unleashed in our government, and finally on the existential fight to protect Social Security from the chain saw of Elon Musk. These are the themes we will cover today and tomorrow.
This is the fight the American people need to see because people's lives and livelihoods are at stake. The healthcare that protects our kids is in danger--our children. Their healthcare is in danger. The benefits that keep our seniors whole are at risk. Senior citizens, in their golden era, could have Medicaid--the rug--pulled out from under them, leaving them in dire straits. The investments that unlock America's future now stand on the edge of a knife.
Why? Why? Why are Republicans doing this? Why are they being so cruel? so callous? so thoughtless? Why are those in the billionaire bubble who seem to run Donald Trump and Elon Musk--why are they doing this? It is very simple. They are trying to give the ultrarich another tax break. The Republicans are enthralled with these very wealthy, very greedy people, and all they want is a tax break.
When Donald Trump became President, they got control of the Republican Party, and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are in the billionaire bubble. And when Democrats expose all of these cuts to healthcare and veterans' aid and benefits for the American people to see, the American people will think it is sickening.
So, tonight, let us begin with Medicaid.
Seventy million--seventy million--people rely on Medicaid in one way or another to provide medical care, and tens of millions more are their families and friends. That includes not just seniors who are within the 70 million but also newborns, parents, Americans with disabilities, rural communities that have access, perhaps, to a single hospital or clinic if they are fortunate. Medicaid--Medicaid--makes all these things possible.
I want to focus on a truly sobering experience I had earlier this week when visiting two nursing homes in New York: the Silver Lake Specialized Care and Rehab Center on Staten Island and the Carillon Nursing and Rehab Center on Long Island. These institutions alone-- there are just 2 of them--serve over 600 residents together and employ 600 people. They are the lifeline to local communities. They help seniors with dementia, with postsurgical rehab, with physical disability support, and so much more.
My visit to these communities was clouded by a shadow of fear and anger. I talked to senior citizens who knew that if Medicaid were cut, they would lose their healthcare. In fact, the owner of Silver Lake-- one of the most esteemed healthcare facilities on Staten Island--told me that if the cut were even half what the Republicans are proposing, his home would close. Hundreds of senior citizens would have no healthcare, and 300 people would lose their jobs. They were frightened. They were scared. They were angry.
There is no question about it: Even if Republicans pass a fraction of the cuts they are pushing, it will devastate these communities.
We have the heads of major hospitals there--many of them not the same party as mine--telling us what would happen if these devastating cuts to Medicaid went through.
On Staten Island, we estimated 18,000 people would lose their jobs. Tens of thousands would no longer get healthcare. It would cause a recession on Staten Island--like that. Seniors at the centers--new seniors who are getting out of hospitals or have a new illness that they are just encountering--would be turned away. There would be no funding. There would be no beds. There would be no place for them to go.
It is not just the residents at these nursing homes; it is their children who now can breathe easy for their parents who helped raise them and worked so hard through the years to provide for them.
Staten Island is a middle-class community, and so is Long Island--the two places I visited--but their kids would not be able to care for most of them. Most of them need more healthcare than just going back to their kids' homes. It is not adequate healthcare for so many of them. Others said their children had no extra room for them. What are even the kids going to do? On both Staten Island and Long Island, these are middle-class communities. They are going to be devastated by these cuts.
Some of the residents said their children might be able to take care of them, but the burden would be immense. These families don't have the financial means to take care of their parents in their advanced ages. They don't have space at home. They don't have the medical know-how to meet the needs like a nursing home does.
For any of you--of the millions of Americans who have a parent who has struggled with dementia or physical disabilities--to those people, we know that our parents need the help of medical professionals to care for them properly. That is why Medicaid is so vital, so important, such a lifeline to tens of millions of families across America. The Republican Medicaid cuts would be a gut punch to these families.
It was the same story on Long Island. Senior citizens are scared, nervous, angry about what these budget cuts would do to them that the Republicans are proposing, that Trump and Musk are proposing. Workers worried they might lose their jobs--and they have worked so hard in these facilities because they care about the patients they are caring for--are told ``No, no more funding'' for no reason. They are doing a great job.
It is the same on Long Island as on Staten Island, and it is the same across all of America in poor communities, which, of course, depend on Medicaid.
For so many people, Medicaid is their only lifeline to healthcare-- for middle-class communities and even well-to-do communities. All of them are nervous, scared, angry, furious at what these cuts would do to them.
Why? people ask. Why are they doing this? Why are they being so mean? Why are they being so cruel? Why are they being so callous?
We have to answer: For one reason--they want to give billionaires a tax cut. They want to take the money away from working families. They want to take things that working families need. They want to take them away so there are more tax cuts for the billionaires.
It angers me. It is infuriating that something so wrong, so callous, so detrimental to America could be right here on the Senate floor with the support of so many Republican Senators.
I say to the Republican Senators: Listen to your constituents. Listen to your constituents. They don't want this. You know that. Are you going to get up on the floor and make a speech that says you are cutting Medicaid because you want to give tax breaks to billionaires? That is what you are doing. Get up and have the courage to say it. Get up and have the courage to say it.
The senior centers I visited were represented, actually, by Republican Members of Congress on both Staten Island and Long Island.
There, I told every patient, every doctor, every nurse, every employee who works in these institutions to call their Congress Member and tell them that their jobs are at risk and, if they are a resident, to tell them their healthcare is at risk. If they are a child of a parent in one of these nursing homes, call.
I told them to make it clear to their Congressmen that the Republican Congressmen and Senators have the power in their hands to stop these cuts because there are narrow margins in both the Senate and the House.
A handful of Senators and a handful of Congressmen, if they have the courage to do the right thing--and most of them--or some of them, at least, know that it is the right thing even though they are afraid to vote yes--they are afraid to vote no and stop this, but they should have the courage to do it.
So I told them. I told everyone I encountered in these two nursing homes and in many other places in New York.
I went to a hospital in the Bronx--one of the biggest hospitals. It serves 1.3 million people in the Bronx. It is the only cancer care treatment for all of those 1.3 million. The leaders of that hospital told me the hospital would probably close if there were a 20-percent cut to Medicaid, and the Republicans are proposing a deeper cut than that in this budget bill. Close. The only hospital. One of the biggest employers. It employees 18,000 people itself. This story could be repeated. The Bronx has poorer communities. Staten Island and Long Island have more middle-class communities. But every one of them will be affected terribly by these cuts. So I told them to call. I tell everyone: We have to stop this. Public sentiment is everything.
Every American in a similar position to those I spoke to should do the same. Call your Congressman. Call your Senator. Tell them you don't want Medicaid to be slashed. Tell them you don't want nutrition assistance to be eliminated. Tell them you don't want our seniors to be abandoned. Tell them you don't want to see these cuts--these cruel, heartless cuts--just so the wealthiest Americans can get another break they don't need.
That is what the next few days are about: fighting these awful cuts done to help the wealthiest Americans get a tax break. That is the fight Democrats will have here on the Senate floor. That is the fight we will have tonight. That is the fight we will have tomorrow and beyond.
Democrats are fighting every day in every way against these attacks against American families, against this plan, which says billionaires win; families lose.
Democrats stand united. We are unified in fighting this awful bill. We will fight the Republican anti-family agenda. We will shine a light on these terrible cuts that Republicans are trying to pass. The American people will be horrified at what they see.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Madam President, families lose, and billionaires win. That is the Republican plan. It is a plan that slashes $1.5 to $2 trillion from programs that families depend on. And why? To fund tax cuts for the very richest Americans.
But that is not all the bad news because there are additional tax cuts for the best and richest in the country--the richest Americans-- and those are unpaid for, and that means debt.
How much more debt does this bill create? The current estimate--and the estimates keep going up--is $5.3 trillion of unpaid-for tax cuts over the next 10 years--$5.3 trillion--trillion with a ``t''--over the next 10 years.
But that is not all. Their plan provides for $37 trillion--at least $37 trillion--in additional debt over the next 30 years. This is a phenomenal, phenomenal number.
And, third, they say: We will tell the American people it adds no new debt; passing this bill adds no new debt.
That is quite a set of plans: slash programs for regular Americans, enrich the richest Americans, run up an additional $37 trillion in debt, and then lie to the American people and say it doesn't cost a thing.
It has become clear, over the last 2 days, about how Republicans are going to justify this. They say they are going to use section 312-- section 312--of the law. Section 312, they say, says that the cost of a program or the impact of a revenue cut through a tax giveaway to the wealthy only costs what the budget chair says it costs. Just take the chair's word for it.
This is the magic wand. It will add $37 trillion to the debt, but if the budget chair says it doesn't, then you just pretend it doesn't. It is kind of like the situation where the king wears the magic robes--at least he thinks he is wearing magic robes, but he is actually walking down the street naked because he doesn't have magic robes--in this case, again, lying to the public about the cost.
In the real world, you have real math. In this special new world under the Republican plan, you have the magic math.
This was not the vision that was laid out back 51 years ago, in 1974, when the Senate created, along with the House, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act.
That act had three pillars. The first pillar was that in a 10-year period, you have to decrease the deficit with the provisions that were in the bill. And then, every year after, in every category, it either has to be deficit-neutral or reduce the deficit according to the provisions that are in the bill.
Then it said we are going to use honest numbers. Before, there had been a lot of smoke and mirrors. There had been a lot of gimmicks. And people on both sides said: No, no, we don't want to do that.
Democrats and Republicans said: Let's use honest numbers. Let's create a Congressional Budget Office to give us impartial numbers so we can be honest among ourselves, have a real debate about any given policy provision or any particular revenue provision, and we can be honest with the American people because, otherwise, we will just keep running up more and more deficits while pretending we are not.
My Republican colleagues initially said: Do you know what? We will just put a clause into the budget resolution. It is called a scoring rule, and that scoring rule will simply say that we are going to say this costs nothing, that there is no additional debt.
A scoring rule has been used in the past. OK, it has been used in multiple years, but it was used to resolve little anomalies in tricky, little twists and changes in revenue bills or in policies' programs. It was always narrow. It always was honest about what it was trying to solve and explainable to the public. It was always consistent with the law, and it was always involving modest sums--modest by standards of the national budget.
Certainly, now, this scoring rule that had been proposed by the Republicans, it was not bipartisan. It was not narrow. It was not improving the budget. It, in fact, was lying about the budgeting. It was not consistent with the law. And it was massive--$37 trillion.
So my colleagues across the aisle, when we pointed this out, they said: Yes, we had better not do that. That is just wrong.
OK. Thank you. Thank you for deciding not to put in a scoring rule that was completely wrong and designed to destroy the budget process.
But now my colleagues across the aisle have said: We will use a different provision called section 312. We won't use the scoring rule. Instead, we are going to go in a different direction that says simply that the cost is what the chair of the Budget Committee says it is.
Now, I want to turn back the clock a little bit. I want to turn back the clock and point out that there were core principles in that 1974 bill, and they were driven by growing bipartisan concern about deficits and debt.
In the 1958 to 1968 decade, the average deficit was about $5 billion per year. That doesn't sound like much now, by our standards, when we are looking at $2 trillion per year, but it was a lot compared to the past. And folks said: Do you know what? That $5 billion per year over that 10 years exploded to an average of $20 billion a year in 1971 through 1973. Oh, my goodness, it quadrupled. We have got to get a handle on these deficits. We don't want to run up the debt--this fourfold increase in annual deficits adding to the debt.
So Democrats and Republicans came together, and they passed the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act. It created a superhighway for this special effort to reduce deficits--a superhighway; a super, filibuster- free highway.
Now, you all may remember Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Robert Byrd was always the fiercest defender of the filibuster. But he, along with 99 other Senators, said: We will create one exception, and that exception will be to reduce the deficit.
And it had these three pillars, which I will mention again. It has to reduce the deficit. The provisions of the bill have to reduce the deficit over the first 10 years. They have to be deficit-neutral in every category in each year after the first 10 years. And we have to use honest numbers.
And to have those honest numbers, we will create the Congressional Budget Office, an impartial body. We will no longer use smoke and mirrors, pretend that things don't cost money when they do cost money.
But then what happened? I will tell you. For 22 years, it worked pretty well. Then along comes the Gingrich revolution, the 1994 election. Now we have the 1995 through 1997 biennium. Some things happened then that, well, one maybe couldn't have foreseen. Maybe they could have. There was an effort to do a balanced budget amendment. It fell one vote short here in the Senate Chamber. It needed 67 votes; it only got 66.
Then there was: We will do a line-item veto--and that was passed. But that gave the power to the President to strike down any line.
The Supreme Court said: No, you can't do that. You can't delegate the power of the purse. The power of the purse belongs with Congress. So that fell.
Then the Republican caucus in charge said: We are going to, instead, do a big tax bill giving enormous benefits to the richest Americans.
Then they said: You know, the problem with that is the Democrats won't work with us. They won't give us 60 votes to do that. Oh, I know, they said, we will do a nuclear option. We will repurpose the deficit- decreasing bill from 1974 and say that it can be used in order to actually increase deficits with tax cuts.
And they succeeded. They had the votes. They repurposed the bill. They blew up the first pillar of those three pillars. That first pillar was the reconciliation process, this special process created in 1974 that can only be used to reduce deficits in the first 10 years.
They blew it up and said: OK. Nuclear option. We have reinterpreted the rule. It can be used to increase deficits.
Well, that was a huge, huge damage to the goal of reducing deficits, and deficits have gone up ever since.
When that happened--when that happened--there was a big protest on the floor. The first Budget Committee chair who passed the reconciliation bill consistent with decreasing deficits was South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings. He said:
That is what it was for. So the Republicans blew up that pillar, all designed to reduce the deficits, and, instead, repurposed it for increasing the deficits. Pillar No. 1 drops.
But, at the same time, the second pillar, that no increase in deficits could occur after 10 years, was sustained by the Chair sitting and presiding over the Senate, and that was Senator Daschle.
Senator Daschle said--well, actually, he asked the question. He was asking the question of the Republican Chair.
He said:
That is beyond 10 years--
And the Presiding Officer responded:
So the second pillar, no deficits in any category beyond 10 years, was preserved--until now.
That was in 1996, and here we are, 29 years later. Now there is a goal to destroy the second and third pillars of the 1974 bill.
I must say, this is extremely extraordinary and disturbing that my Republican colleagues, who run on fiscal responsibility, destroyed the first pillar of the special system to reduce deficits in 1996, and tonight, they are proposing to destroy the second and third pillars.
In that second pillar, no deficits beyond year 10; every category, every year has to be deficit-neutral or reduce the deficit.
We can compare that to the law that has just been put forward--or the guidance that has just been put forward. We can look at year 11, the instructions that go in every category--year 12, year 13, year 20, year 100. It goes on forever, into the future, and the Republican bill guidance fails the Byrd test.
Now, the Byrd test really gets applied in a second stage of the reconciliation process. We are in the budget resolution that sends instructions to committees. Those committees will send back specific revenue provisions: increase this revenue here, reduce it there, proceed to add this policy program, reduce this policy program. When it comes back, every category--that is, every title--of the reconciliation bill, in every single year, by the Byrd rule, has to be deficit-neutral or decrease the deficit.
So we will have that debate, but we will have that debate when the reconciliation bill comes back from committee to this floor because my Republican colleagues decided to postpone that debate by taking the scoring rule out of their proposed budget resolution and said: We will kick it down the road to the next stage.
And, certainly, we will be here, fiercely defending the deficit- reducing vision of pillars 2 and 3--pillar 2: no deficit in any category or any title of the bill beyond year 10; and pillar 3: use honest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. That pillar has survived since 1974. We even put that pillar into law specifically in 1985 in a bipartisan way. We wanted to emphasize how important that was.
Just think about how much more important this process of deficit reduction, special rule of the reconciliation bill, is today than it was back in 1974. In 1974, the debt-to-GDP ratio: 23 percent. Tonight, in 2025, it is 100 percent. It is equal to the entire gross domestic product of the United States. In 1974, the annual deficit was about $6 billion. Today, it is $2 trillion. In 1974, total debt: $475 billion. Today, it is $37 trillion.
Now, consider this: All of the debt run up over the last 249 years since the Declaration of Independence, right now, is just a little bit less than $37 trillion. In this single bill--this single bill-- Republicans are saying we will add $37 trillion more--at least that much. When the numbers really come out, we expect it to be higher, but $37 trillion more to the debt. That is a much bigger burden on the future.
And what do the economists say about that bigger burden? They said it will increase interest rates that families have to pay on their mortgage and on their car loan since it will decrease the capital available to private industry and slow down our economy.
This magic math goes by the name of ``current policy baseline.'' It sounds very academic, but it is essentially the big lie.
Consider this: You sign a contract to rent a home for a year, and renting that home costs $2,000 per month so you know you are going to have to pay $24,000 over the year. And at the end of the year, you say: You know what, I am going to renew that agreement to rent this apartment. And your spouse says: You know what, that is going to cost us another $24,000 in rent.
And you say: No. I am using the Republican magic math. It won't cost a single dime because we will just pretend that a year ago we had planned to rent the apartment for a second year; and therefore, it is no more than we thought we would pay a year ago--except a year ago you said you were only going to rent the house for a year. In other words, it is a big lie.
It is the very smoke and mirrors, the very gimmicks that Democrats and Republicans came together and stopped back in 1974. Fifty-one years ago, we said this game of lying to the public has to end. But tonight, my Republican colleagues are saying that game will continue if they have their way.
Well, we say they must not have their way. We are going to stand up and say no to families lose and billionaires win. We are going to say no to magic math that lies to the American people about the cost of their bill, driven by massive tax cuts to the richest Americans.
It is a simple request: honesty and integrity. We should not be engaging in a big lie, and Democrats will have no part of it. We are going to be honest about what every provision of the reconciliation bill costs. We are going to be determined to make sure that the Byrd rule stands.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic whip.
Madam President, this has been an amazing week in the U.S. Senate, and I have served here for over 25 years. Just 2 days ago, our colleague Cory Booker, from the State of New Jersey, ended a filibuster on the floor after 25 hours--broke the record, longest speech in the history of the Senate. And an impassioned speech it was. I was happy to be here for a major part of it.
There was a big celebration on our side of the aisle. The Galleries were filled in a way I have never seen before, cheering Cory Booker for his achievement. It is a moment all of us who are lucky enough to serve in the Senate will remember the rest of our lives. But I remember another moment that affected more people than this miraculous feat by Cory Booker.
It was July 28 of 2017. It was 2:30 in the morning. I was seated at this desk, and a historic vote was about to take place. The vote was whether or not we would keep the Affordable Care Act--or ObamaCare, as it was known then--extending health insurance to millions of Americans, some of whom had never had it.
At the time, President Trump was in office, and he and the majority of the Republicans were determined to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, to eliminate the insurance that millions of American families depended on to protect their kids and themselves.
It was the closest possible vote. In the end, at least three Republican Senators voted to save the Affordable Care Act, but the one key vote and the one I remember was John McCain's. John McCain, an extraordinary man, served this country in ways that we could hardly ask anyone else to serve: a prisoner of war for over 5 years during Vietnam, came battling back, and was elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona.
And he was a real maverick. You never knew where John was going to end up, but you always wanted to end up with him, if you could, because it was always a spirited contest, and he usually won it.
And this vote was dragged out for a long period of time--2:30 in the morning, for goodness' sake. And somebody said: John McCain is the last person to vote, but he has been called off the Senate floor to go into a room behind and take a telephone call from Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, President, in his first term, was asking John McCain to cast the deciding vote to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, health insurance coverage for millions of Americans.
Madam President, I sat here, and I watched as John McCain came in from that phone call. And no one knew what he was going to do. Really, no one knew. John was the kind of person, you could never quite be sure.
And he walked in the well near the table where the Republicans gather for votes, and he stood there. And he barely raised his left arm-- because it was broken while he was a prisoner of war--just enough to get his thumb up and go ``no.'' No. That was it.
John McCain, with that ``no'' vote, saved the Affordable Care Act, and millions of Americans' health insurance was protected.
This was during Trump's first administration, and he had other priorities, and they certainly didn't include ObamaCare. He wanted to eliminate it. John McCain's courage came through that night. He broke with his party because he knew what was at stake. He knew that, for millions of Americans, there was no alternative when it came to health insurance--it was the Affordable Care Act or nothing--and he had the guts to vote no.
Oh, he was pilloried and criticized by the Republican faithful from one end of the country to the other, but those of us who believe he did the right thing will never forget that moment of courage.
In a strange way, today--Thursday, April 3, 2025--we are returning to that moment in history. The Republicans under President Trump, in his second term, want to perpetuate his tax cut that he gave primarily to the wealthiest people in America and add to it at the expense of healthcare for America.
When we talk about healthcare in America, one of the programs that is so critical is called Medicaid. In days gone by, Medicaid was a rarely used health insurance plan for the poorest and disabled people in America, but it has changed. It has become much different. And let me tell you why that is an interesting context for where we stand now.
Many Americans from coast to coast followed the stock market today. The reaction of the stock market to the Trump tariff tax and the chaos that has been created since he announced we were going into a trade war with virtually every nation on Earth--they watched carefully as the stock market reacted to it today.
The Dow Jones Average, which is supposed to be an indicator of the state of the economy, lost 4 percent of its value today. I don't know what that means for most people, but I know that most people watch it because it involves their own retirement plans: IRAs and 401(k)s and other plans that they have based on the value of stock. There has to be a sinking feeling--I am sure there is--in many households and families across America to see so much of the value that they have saved up for a lifetime disappear in one day reacting to the Trump tariff tax and what it meant across the country.
And here we come this evening, the same day as this Dow Jones plunge of 4 percent, to discuss--what?--healthcare, again, under President Trump. And this time it is connected to retirement and savings and the future of a lot of families.
Let me tell you a story about one. I am going to try to mask the details because I don't want anyone to reflect on the actual person. But he is a friend of mine, and he is a professional in Illinois, a wonderful guy, a community leader. And he had a beautiful family--he still does, for that matter--but his wife developed Alzheimer's. This lovely woman reached the point where she had to be put into a care facility to take care of her day-to-day. It breaks my heart to even think about it, but it was a fact. He didn't see it coming. There is no way he could have.
But, for years now, she has survived physically while mentally she has deteriorated to the point where she cannot communicate with him or others. It is an expensive undertaking, that type of care facility. He can afford it, but many people can't.
So what do they do? What happens when your mother or grandmother, when someone you dearly love in your family, reaches a point where they need this kind of care? Well, you do what you can, the best you can, with your own savings and your own resources. But, ultimately, the major source of funding for people who are in these facilities is Medicaid.
If you cut the Medicaid reimbursement, it limits the opportunity for these people to get good, professional care--people you love, people who it has broken your heart because of their illness, but you want to give them the very best in the parting years of their lives.
So when you cut Medicaid, which is going to be proposed by this Republican budget resolution, it is at the expense of families' peace of mind and resources they have saved for their own future, their own retirement.
That isn't the only one. In the State of Illinois, half of the children who are born in the State are paid for by the Medicaid system. What happens if you cut back on Medicaid reimbursement in those cases? It means less prenatal care; the likelihood, I am sorry to say, that kids, some, will be born with problems that could have been avoided and, more seriously, whether or not these children will even survive birth. That is what Medicaid is all about.
We are talking about cutting health coverage for those in care facilities, as well as those in hospitals or giving birth.
Why? Why would the Republicans even suggest that we cut this just like they did years ago when John McCain cast that deciding vote? Why under a Trump Presidency do they go after healthcare first? Why is that their target?
They believe that the vulnerable people who receive this kind of healthcare assistance won't be able to fight back--and they are desperate to raise more revenue for what purpose? To give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the America.
For goodness' sakes, Elon Musk does not need a tax cut. He is a multi-multibillionaire, the wealthiest man in the world. Why in the world would he cut back on any kind of healthcare for Americans to give a man in that station in life a tax break? That is what it is all about. But there is more to the story.
I am honored to represent Illinois. I love the whole State. It is where I was born. And I am honored to represent the great city of Chicago. Oh, it is controversial. There are some people in downstate Illinois that say they ought to go off and be their own State, retire them. I am not one of those people. I am proud of the fact that Chicago is part of our State.
But my roots are in downstate Illinois, born in St. Louis, raising my family in Springfield. I have lived in and represented the smaller communities downstate in the rural areas. That is how I got to Congress in the first place, and that is how I stayed in the U.S. Senate.
What are these cuts Republicans are proposing in Medicaid going to do to rural and downstate Illinois and other rural and downstate areas around the Nation? The reality is very clear: Fewer resources to hospitals in sparsely populated areas mean that many of those hospitals will not survive. Today, more than half of those hospitals are hanging by a thread, operating in the red. To cut Medicaid reimbursement to those hospitals is literally going to close their doors and turn out their lights.
How important is a little hospital in a community downstate? It is the economic engine. It is the hub of life for the economy of that area. Take away that hospital, and it not only endangers the people living around it, it also means a lot of jobs are lost, too, and businesses that the people frequent often are going to be threatened as well.
So why would we cut Medicaid reimbursement and close these downstate hospitals, giving a tax break to the wealthiest people in America? It makes no sense. Where are our priorities? Where is our humanity to even consider that?
I don't understand on the other side of the aisle how Republican Senators--many of whom represent smalltown America, too, and really care in their hearts about it--can stand by and let this happen. The net result of this is going to be the quality of life threatened by the people who live in those areas.
I want to tell you a story about a community I visited 2 weeks ago-- two communities. One was Taylorville, IL. And I asked the hospital administrator in Taylorville, which is about 30 miles from Springfield, to come and invite other hospital administrators from the area and tell me what the Medicaid cuts proposed by the Republicans to give tax breaks to the wealthy will mean to these hospitals. To a person, they said the same thing: They may survive, but it is a big question.
And what difference will it make? Well, in some of these hospitals, it means that, instead of 30 minutes' drive to the hospital to deliver the baby, it will be an hour and 30 minutes. I can still remember our first babies in my family. The thought of being in the car for an hour and a half with my wife in labor would scare me to death. That would be the reality for people, and alternatives are just not available.
Why in the world would it reach a point where we would cut that kind of coverage, that kind of protection, that peace of mind to give tax breaks to the wealthiest people? It makes no sense.
Medicaid and the CHIP program cover nearly 40 million children, half of all the kids in America. Medicaid provides health coverage for 60 percent of seniors in nursing homes, the ones I mentioned earlier, and it is the largest funder of addiction and mental health treatment.
I will tell you, I know the cases pretty well of people who are desperate for addiction treatment. They realize that they are addicted. They realize they have a problem, and they are anxious to get started and cleaning their lives up. Medicaid is the source of funding for that kind of counsel, and to cut back on that is to really sentence these people to a lifetime of fear and, sadly, cost many of their lives.
In Illinois, 3.4 million people are enrolled in Medicaid, 1.5 million children. Under the Republican plans to slash Medicaid, 775,000 adults in Illinois who gained health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the same one that John McCain saved in the first Trump Presidency, would lose their coverage almost overnight. How would you like to be in a situation where you don't have health insurance at a critical moment?
I know. I was there. I was a student at Georgetown Law School. I got married in my second year. God sent us a beautiful little baby girl right away. We were so happy. And then a few weeks after she was born, we learned she had a serious congenital heart defect. I was a law student. I didn't have much income, and I had no health insurance. So my wife and I took our baby girl over to Children's Hospital here in Washington, DC.
We sit in the charity ward, and we waited until our name was called. And we saw a doctor who I prayed to God would be able to save our baby's life. I never felt more helpless in my life than I did at that moment, to have this little girl come into this world and her father couldn't provide health insurance.
Luckily, she survived. Great people did great favors for our family that I will never forget. I have never forgotten when there is a health crisis or health issue that is debated on this floor.
All of us want good health insurance, and to cut the programs for no reason other than to give tax breaks to the wealthiest people makes no sense whatsoever. It is not sensible. It is not thoughtful. It is not humane. That is what this debate is all about.
Are we going to protect health insurance for Americans so that they have some peace of mind that they have access to good care, or are we going to cut them off, and tell them they are on their own, whether it is mental health counseling, addiction counseling, or the birth of a child, or basic healthcare? That is what is at stake here. That is what is at stake.
So I would plead with my colleagues--and I know that it is unlikely. I have seen the votes. I know the party discipline. I have seen it on my side of the aisle. I am sure it is on the other side of the aisle. I am praying to God there is going to be one or two John McCains who are going to step forward and lift their hand enough to vote and save health insurance for Americans across the board. I know some people would be unhappy; in fact, some may threaten to defeat you politically because of it.
But I am sure that after John voted no to save the Affordable Care Act despite President Trump's telephone call in his first term, John had the satisfaction of knowing that, for millions of Americans, he was the man and his
Madam President, I am going to close by saying that this is an issue that is near and dear to my heart, and I think a lot of other people too. They have gone through experiences much like my own. I know they realize that we have few moments of opportunity of service in the Senate to really make a difference in the lives of American families, to give hope to people who have given up because of a mother who is in a nursing home or because of a child with an illness.
I received letters. Sophia, a single mom from Palatine, IL--17 years of age, she gave birth to a baby boy. Her son was born with many medical complications. He had to undergo two surgeries in his first day of life. Can you imagine?
By the age of 4, he had undergone eight separate surgical procedures to address ongoing medical challenges. How did Sophia of Palatine afford the lifesaving care for her son? He was covered by Medicaid.
She wrote to my office. She said:
Amber from Springfield, IL, told my office in no uncertain terms: You cut Medicaid, you endanger my sick child's life.
That is what it is. It is a life and death issue. It is not how many dollars you have leftover when you file your taxes. It is a life and death issue that we are debating.
I want to thank those who have spoken this evening already--Senator Schumer and Senator Merkley--for their leadership on this issue. I plead with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Please, there has got to be someone over there who will step up and have a McCain moment that will save healthcare for millions of Americans, and I am praying that it happens.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Madam President, I rise today on behalf of the 1.2 million Wisconsinites who rely on Medicaid--or as we call it in Wisconsin, BadgerCare--for their health insurance. And I rise today in their defense because their healthcare is under attack.
I really want to focus right now kind of taking off where Senator Durbin left off talking about our children, our babies. One in three children in Wisconsin rely on Medicare for their life insurance. That is one in three children in Wisconsin's urban, suburban, and rural counties who need Medicaid just to see a doctor to get regular checkups or to get vaccines and to stay healthy.
I have traveled across Wisconsin, meeting with constituents who are terrified about what these cuts will mean for their families, their finances, and their health. I would like to share a few of those stories with you this evening.
I think about people like Megan from Wisconsin, a single mother of two young children who relies on Medicaid so that her kids can get regular check-ups to see the dentist. She reached out to me to share that without Medicaid, her entire paycheck would go to just keeping her children healthy--with nothing left over to pay for rent or keep food on the table.
I heard from Shelley in Lake Holcombe, WI, who reached out to me about her 17-year-old daughter Chloe. Chloe was diagnosed with leukemia last October. Chloe receives chemotherapy 5 days a week, and her parents drive her almost an hour each way to Eau Claire, WI, so that she can get the treatments that she needs. Without Medicaid, the cost of Chloe's treatment would force Shelley and parents like her to make an impossible choice between financial ruin or not getting the care that they need for their children.
I have also heard from dozens of Wisconsin families whose children live with disabilities. They are terrified of what financial cuts will mean for their kids' future and their family's finances.
Jennifer in Wauwatosa wrote to my office about her son Will. Will is a 15-year-old sophomore at Wauwatosa West whom she described as vibrant and loving. Will also has Down syndrome which, among other medical care, has meant that he has needed a total of 11 ear tube surgeries just so that he can hear. Jennifer wrote me that the math on those costs to their family is pretty simple. Eleven surgeries which cost $10,000 each, without insurance, would cost her family $110,000. She said without Medicaid, she and her husband would struggle to give their children the lives they deserve, including paying for their other son's college tuition.
She wrote:
I also heard from Brooke in Thorp, WI. She shared that because of Medicaid and the speech therapy for her 4-year-old son that he receives, she has, for the first time this year, heard his voice utter more than one syllable.
Imagine that.
She wrote:
We can talk about the number of children who will be impacted by cuts to Medicaid, a total of over 30 million nationwide. While that number is staggering, it is important to remember that every single child who relies on Medicaid has a story like Chloe's or Will's. And they have parents like Megan and Brooke who just want what is best for their children and are terrified about their future if Medicaid is taken away.
If my colleagues on the Republican side want to go through with cuts--the ones laid out in the House's budget plan--it is these families Republicans must answer to.
Donald Trump and congressional Republicans can explain why they are planning to rip away healthcare for children so that the top 1 percent can get richer.
I, for one, would like them to answer for the chaos, for the fear, for the heartache that they are causing families in my State.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
Madam President, I want to thank my colleague from Wisconsin, Senator Baldwin, for such excellent, poignant, moving descriptions of the real cost of this budget plan that we are on the floor to consider tonight.
I rise today to join my colleagues and the people of New Hampshire in standing up against the attempt by the Trump administration and some of my Republican colleagues to effectively end Medicaid as we know it and add $37 trillion over the next 30 years to our national debt, all in order to pay for more tax giveaways for corporate special interests and billionaires.
Americans of every political stripe are alarmed because this bid to end Medicaid as we know it will lead to more families, more children becoming sick and unable to get care, and because ending Medicaid as we know it will devastate our economy, weaken our workforce, and, most of all, make our people less free.
Medicaid is a pillar of America's healthcare system. Tens of millions of Americans, including working Americans, pregnant women, and millions of children depend on Medicaid every day for routine care, for treatment for chronic illnesses, for lifesaving care from serious illnesses, for treatment for addiction, and for much more.
No legislation has done more to allow more Americans to live longer and healthier lives than the bills that established Medicaid and Medicare and the efforts that followed to strengthen both of these landmark laws.
So before we proceed, let's take a step back for a moment and remember that Congress created Medicaid for two simple reasons. Prior to Medicaid's creation, a great swath of our country--tens of millions of Americans--were
We established and later expanded Medicaid because we understood that, in a country as great as ours, we don't turn our backs on our neighbors. But we also created Medicaid because we know that it is in all of our economic interests to have more healthy people. When more people are healthy and able to work, they can get ahead and stay ahead, provide a better life for their family, join the workforce, and, in so doing, make our economy stronger.
There is, of course, much more work to do to make healthcare more affordable for all of our people. But Medicaid saves lives. Over the course of the program's history, Medicaid has allowed hundreds of millions of Americans who otherwise would be uninsured to live healthier lives and to build a future.
But now the Trump administration and some of my Republican colleagues are poised to end Medicaid as we know it in order to pay for tax breaks for corporate special interests and billionaires.
The Republican plan to eviscerate Medicaid would be devastating to our country. The Republican plan is, unsurprisingly, short on details. But they have put forward proposals that, if you do the math, mean cutting a third of Federal Medicaid funding, all to give billionaires and corporate special interests a tax break.
Now, let's look at what this decidedly unreasonable, outrageous, and dangerous plan would do. Cutting Medicaid by a third means living in a country where millions of children no longer have healthcare; a country where more of our friends and neighbors get sick and can't afford to see a doctor; a country where more of our friends and neighbors stay out of the workforce because they can't afford treatments for chronic conditions like lupus, making them too sick to work; a country where families who have children with disabilities can't find adequate coverage to provide the kind of complex care, both at home and in school, that these children need. One issue, in particular, I want to highlight is the way in which slashing Medicaid would weaken our fight against addiction.
New Hampshire has been hit hard by the fentanyl crisis. These Medicaid cuts could kick hundreds of thousands of people struggling with addiction off of Medicaid, out of treatment, and off the road to recovery. This will, among other things, make law enforcement's job even harder, and it will make our children less safe.
So let's be clear about what the Republican plan to slash Medicaid will do. It will make people less healthy. It will weaken our workforce and hurt our economy. The fight against fentanyl will only get tougher, and more people will die who otherwise could have lived.
In the administration's plan to eviscerate Medicaid, the cuts only appear on the page as percentages and dollar signs, but their impact will be felt by real people.
My office, as has Senator Baldwin's, Senator Kim's, and Senator Durbin's, has been deluged with letters and calls from constituents who are concerned about the administration's attack on Medicaid.
I could tell you hundreds of stories, but instead I will just give you three.
There is Michelle from Manchester. She was diagnosed with a rare and frequently fatal form of cancer that upended her career and her life. To go through the long process of cancer treatment by paying out of pocket would be daunting, perhaps even prohibitive for most anyone. But Michelle was covered by Medicaid. She got the care that she needed. She got healthy. She was able to go back to work. She is now cancer-free because of her courage and strength and because she was covered by Medicaid.
Then there is Noa from Merrimack. Now, Noa is 20 years old and experiences disabilities and is blind. She has had to face challenges that few of us can imagine. But thanks in part to the support that she has received through Medicaid, she has been able to have many of the opportunities that all parents want for their kids and that all kids want for themselves.
She has a part-time job at a nearby bank. She does charity work delivering flowers to seniors. She loves horseback riding and has competed as a Special Olympian. She accomplished all this thanks to her bravery, optimism, and generosity, but she may not have even gotten that chance without Medicaid.
And then there is Cheri from Lebanon. Like other Granite Staters, she has had struggles with addiction, as well as mental health challenges, but Cheri was eligible for Medicaid. She got treatment and went into recovery. She was able to go back to work. Today, Cheri is a perinatal peer support educator and coordinator for Dartmouth Health. She helps families every day. Because she got care when she needed it, she is now working to provide care for others, touching untold and unknown numbers of lives through her work. And she was my guest this year at the President's joint address to Congress. But none of her recovery, employment, and lifesaving work would have been possible or happened without Medicaid.
So if the administration intends to eviscerate Medicaid, if they intend to go through with their plan to cut Medicaid by a third to pay for a tax break for billionaires, then before they do, they should at least stop and explain to these three people--Michelle, Noa, Cheri--who is the one that they want to kick off of Medicaid.
How would any of us be better off if any of these three people are forced to go without healthcare?
Most Americans are proud of our capacity to come together and ensure that our friends and neighbors can get healthcare and be able to work and raise families. But this administration evidently considers the provision of lifesaving healthcare to Americans from all walks of life to be a problem.
Now, beyond the huge pricetag of this budget plan--a plan that explodes the deficit by 37 trillion more dollars over 30 years--and let's be clear: The Republican budget writers are going to use accounting gimmicks to try to hide this cost. And let's be clear too that the $37 trillion in additional debt won't be used to improve healthcare. It is to pay for tax breaks for billionaires.
But there is another cost to the President's attacks on Medicaid, because as important as it is that we protect the healthcare provided by Medicare--and that is tremendously important--protecting Medicaid healthcare marks neither the beginning nor the end of what we need to do to improve healthcare in our country and make it more affordable.
We need to confront real challenges in our country's healthcare system. Big Pharma keeps drug prices too high. We have the best doctors in the world, but too few people can afford to see them. Too many Americans live with chronic diseases.
Labor and delivery centers across our country are more and more scarce, and rural hospitals are struggling. Americans need to summon our best ideas and our best efforts to meet these challenges, but we will not make progress so long as this administration continues to keep us trapped in old debates and tries to unravel bipartisan support for the progress that we have already made.
Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. When I was Governor of New Hampshire, we managed to expand Medicaid and balance the budget at the same time, and we did both on a bipartisan basis. We did it with the support of many business leaders and law enforcement leaders who didn't always vote the same way come November, but they did agree that we are all better off when people are healthy.
President Trump and congressional Republicans are presenting us with a false choice. We don't have to choose between keeping the status quo on the one hand and blowing up our healthcare system on the other. We don't have to buy the falsehood that, somehow, we have to close rural hospitals and throw seniors out of our nursing homes to improve our healthcare system. There are better ideas, and a whole lot of them are bipartisan.
There are bipartisan bills right now to lower the costs for patients when they go to the doctor by implementing something called site neutrality. There are bipartisan bills that will lower drug
As Americans, we don't shrink from challenges. We don't surrender to cynicism and lies. We work together. We do hard things. We do what it takes to build a better future for our country, and we do it in a way that brings all of us along together, and that includes ensuring that all of us have healthcare. That is the way we created Medicaid. That is the way we expanded Medicaid. And it is through that same spirit of hard work and optimism that we can overcome the healthcare challenges of today if we can summon the political will to do it.
A will has been so sorely lacking since this President arrived on the scene. The Senate should not pass a budget that rips healthcare away from millions of Americans--60,000 of whom live in my State--just to give tax cuts to billionaires, but that is what this budget will do. It is un-American, and it is shameful.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Madam President, I rise today to tell the stories of the nearly 2 million New Jerseyans who rely on Medicaid for their critical care. I do this because their care is at risk. I do this because the care of more than 72 million Americans across our country enrolled in Medicaid is at risk. They are at risk because Republicans in the House and the Senate have chosen to take away their care so that Elon Musk and the very richest Americans can pay a little less in taxes.
That is the choice they have thrust upon the American people. It is a choice that I don't believe they truly understand, so I would like to take some of my time today on the floor to explain what happens when we choose Elon Musk's well-being over the people we have sworn to serve.
To truly understand this, you need to understand that for tens of millions of Americans, Medicaid is their lifeline from the womb to their final years.
In New Jersey, nearly one out of three births is covered by Medicaid. But even before that birth takes place, mothers receive prenatal care covered by Medicaid. That means that for millions of parents across the country, the first images they see of their child in those early ultrasounds are because of Medicaid. It means that prenatal vitamins that provide the folic acid necessary to ensure proper development are because of Medicaid. It means that if there is a complication in a pregnancy, those parents can focus on their health and the health of their unborn child, not whether or not they will be able to cover the costs of their care. That is because of Medicaid.
So when Republicans are saying we need to cut Medicaid, remember that it is Elon Musk who wins and those expecting parents who lose.
When those children are born into the world, tens of millions rely on Medicaid. Nationally, about 40 percent of children are enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP. In New Jersey, one-third of children--one in three kids in my State--are enrolled in Medicaid.
As a father of a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old, I can tell you that the most important thing is knowing that your kids are healthy.
There are a lot of things that are outside of your control as a parent. You can do everything right, but sometimes you just need help. Kids get sick, and having that assurance that they can get the care they need is an important thing.
When you take away Medicaid, you are not just taking away care, you are taking away the peace of mind that parents deserve. You are taking away the ability for parents to look their kids in the eye and say: It is going to be OK.
I wanted to share with you two stories that have stuck with me. I heard from Nicole, a mother from New Jersey who has a developmentally disabled son, Jordan. Jordan is 24. His mother said that a Medicaid cut would be ``catastrophic.'' She said that the care she receives from Medicaid is ``vitally important.''
That sense of importance and urgency I heard from Nicole I saw echoed from Jamie from Hazlet. Jamie's son David was born paralyzed, nonverbal, and he is relying on a feeding tube. Jamie told reporters that one of David's medications ``can cost up to $1,000 a month.'' She said that if Republicans are successful in cutting Medicaid, ``we would have to choose--are we going to eat? pay the bills? or keep him alive?'' She said, ``It is a life-or-death situation.''
So when Republicans are talking about cutting Medicaid to hand tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, the choice they are making is to leave people like Nicole and Jordan, like Jamie and David behind.
At some point, our children grow up and leave, but even then, so many across this country rely on Medicaid for their basic care. In New Jersey, one in seven adults between the ages of 19 and 64 is covered by Medicaid.
When you look at the choice ahead of us between care and tax cuts for the superrich, I want you to think about Caroline from Mount Holly. Caroline called my office asking that I oppose this budget plan. When she outlined her reason for not cutting Medicaid, she spoke in the clearest possible terms:
Caroline is disabled. Her daughter takes care of her through the Managed Long-Term Services and Supports Program.
She ended her message by saying:
These are the people that need help, not Elon Musk, not the billionaires.
It is people like Caroline from Hackettstown. Caroline called my office because her brother is on Medicaid. He is scheduled to get heart surgery in the next couple of months--something that is scary enough when you have the certainty of healthcare. But Caroline doesn't have that if her brother's Medicaid is cut.
She said:
These are the people that need help.
Our neighbors who sometimes need the most help are those who are disabled. In New Jersey, one out of every three working-age adults with a disability is on Medicaid.
Just last month, I invited Kevin Nunez--a disabled New Jerseyan and an advocate for his community--down to the Capitol. Kevin relies on Medicaid for his care, his caregiver, his basic quality of life. I brought him to the Capitol because I wanted Donald Trump to have to face someone whose healthcare he was threatening to take away.
But it wasn't just Kevin there at the Capitol; we saw his caregiver Edna there. The work she does every day is truly incredible.
We should support our caregivers, should honor their service, and cutting the funding that allows them to do their job is not the way to do that.
Kevin is 1 of more than 15.5 million people across America with a disability who are covered by Medicaid. He is 1 of approximately 4.5 million people who use Medicaid for home care workers like Edna.
The choice we are facing is abandoning those Americans like Kevin and Edna, who just need basic care, or giving another tax cut to those at the very top. For me, that is not a choice.
Finally, as we go through adulthood and age, Medicaid becomes more important than ever. Seniors across our Nation are relying on Medicaid for the care they need to live. Sixty percent of nursing home residents in New Jersey use Medicaid to pay for care. When seniors are on a fixed income, like so many of them are, Medicaid can be the difference between life or death.
Annie, a teacher in New Jersey, called my office recently. Her mother is on Medicaid--71 years old, recently had hip surgery. She has no other income than her Social Security and asked that we do everything we can to make sure that her Medicaid isn't cut.
As someone who is not just a father of two young kids but as a caretaker of an older parent, it weighs on me, and I understand the challenges that are there, knowing that you have to do everything you can to make sure the people you love have the care they need.
Life is hard enough. Care is hard enough. The point of Medicaid, the
So when Republicans come to the floor with a budget that threatens to cut Medicaid so they can give tax cuts and tax breaks to the ultrarich, the choice they are putting before us is making your lives worse and make their lives better. It is making your healthcare worse to make their bank accounts bigger. It is making your future more uncertain to make their futures brighter.
That can't be an acceptable choice, and it is not one we have to make. We can reject this budget resolution and save Medicaid and save healthcare. We can reject this budget resolution and choose to support that expecting mother who just wants to give birth to a healthy child. We can reject this budget resolution and choose to support that child as they grow. We can reject this budget resolution and choose to support our neighbors who work hard but just need that little bit of help to stay healthy and achieve the American dream. Finally, we can reject this budget resolution and choose to support our seniors. We owe the best care to them in their golden years.
This is the moment to show the 2 million New Jerseyans on Medicaid, the nearly 80 million Americans on Medicaid, and every other American across this country that we choose their well-being over the wealth and power of those who already have plenty. Let's reject this budget resolution and do the right thing for them.
I yield the floor.
H. CON. RES. 14
Madam President, I rise this evening once again to highlight the stories of Wisconsinites who would be impacted by cuts to Medicaid that my Republican colleagues are proposing.
Earlier this evening, I talked about children, babies, our most vulnerable. Now I would like to talk about older adults.
I rise to share the story of Renee. Renee is a 60-year-old woman. She lives in Milwaukee, WI. In October 2023, Renee was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. It had metastasized to her brain, her lungs, and her liver.
She depended upon Medicaid for that diagnosis through a program that Congress created, and she also depends on Medicaid--or BadgerCare, as we call it in the State of Wisconsin--for her treatment.
Without Medicaid, she said, ``[I] would be forced to ration or forgo cancer treatment--hastening my death--or send me and my husband into bankruptcy trying to keep me alive.''
In March, last month, I brought Renee to President Trump's State of the Union Address to show this President who his massive cuts to Medicaid will hurt.
Medicaid provides health coverage to 7.2 million seniors nationwide. That is millions of Americans just like Renee who rely on Medicaid for the lifesaving treatment they need.
I also heard from Linda. Linda lives in Viroqua, WI, where her husband and she run a dairy farm that they bought nearly 22 years ago. Linda served her community for 30 years as a registered nurse, working primarily with new moms and babies, before she was forced to retire due to chronic health issues. Since then, she and her husband have relied on Medicaid and he on Medicare for their healthcare because they cannot afford other types of insurance.
Like so many dairy farms in the State of Wisconsin, Linda and her husband work on very tight margins, made even tighter by Trump's first- term tariffs, which, according to Linda, ``put us into poverty.'' This was in Trump's first term. Now they are staring down another Trump trade war and wondering how it is going to impact their dairy operation.
She wrote:
This fight to protect Medicaid for seniors is personal to me and dozens of Wisconsinites. My own mother relied on Medicaid at the end of her life to afford nursing home care, as do the majority of Wisconsinites in skilled nursing homes. Six in ten residents in our State's nursing homes use Medicaid, or over 10,000 seniors who might not be able to otherwise afford to have a safe roof over their heads.
Medicaid also supports more than 43,000 elderly or disabled adults who receive long-term care at home in our community. That includes people like Tammy in Monona, WI, whose father Bud battled dementia at the end of his life. Medicaid allowed Tammy's dad to stay in his home for the last 5 years of his life with the support of at-home caregivers.
She wrote to me:
There are so many pleas that I hear from my constituents in every corner of our State, and it is these constituents that I hope President Trump and congressional Republicans are listening to when they think about ripping away Medicaid to pay for their tax cuts for big corporations and billionaires.
Seniors like Renee and Linda know that Medicaid is a lifeline for Americans who otherwise would have nowhere to turn. It is Wisconsinites--who will face bankruptcy just to stay well--who will pay for Donald Trump's giveaway to the top 1 percent.
I cannot believe that my Republican colleagues are even considering a plan that is so backward and so cruel for hard-working Wisconsinites and seniors. This is wrong, and we must continue to fight back and say loudly and clearly: Hands off Medicaid.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, well, we are back here again with another variation of the Trump plan and the Republican plan to do further damage to our economy and to the working men and women of this country. It has been sliced and diced and repackaged and unpackaged, but it still boils down to a very simple equation: big tax cuts for the very, very wealthy and cuts to Medicaid and other key programs that are essential to Americans.
This resolution is going to cost a lot of money--about $5.8 trillion with a ``t.''
Yesterday, President Trump unveiled his tariff policies and today, the markets reacted. They lost $2.5 trillion of value. He is just taking a sledgehammer to our economy and a sledgehammer to the working families who depend upon these programs like Medicaid and a sledgehammer to our universities and medical schools and research laboratories, which have made us the premier center for research innovation and healthcare in the world. And with these sledgehammer blows, I don't think we can maintain that status.
These proposals by the President and my Republican colleagues are designed to take away the healthcare coverage from millions of Americans--seniors, kids, veterans, individuals with disabilities--and they particularly seem to focus on Medicaid.
Medicaid provides essential healthcare services for the most vulnerable populations in the country. It covers nearly 80 million people, if you combine those covered by the Children's Health Insurance Plan, CHIP.
In my home State of Rhode Island, over 300,000 people--and that is about one-third of my State--depend on Medicaid. And the Republicans are talking about cutting this program by at least $880 billion, which would be devastating. Looking at the Medicaid recipients in Rhode Island. It is interesting. One in five adults ages 19 to 64 are covered; one in three children are covered. And we all know how critical healthcare is for children because a childhood problem left untreated can lead, often, to much more serious health consequences as they grow older--much more dependency on social programs, which are paid for by us. Good healthcare as a child guarantees, in many, many, and most cases, success in school, success in life, and a healthy life--one in three children in Rhode Island need Medicaid.
Five in eight people residing in nursing homes in my home state are also receiving Medicaid. Let me tell you what is going to happen when Medicaid is cut by this extraordinary amount of money, $880 billion. A lot of nursing homes will close because their margin, the difference between opening the doors and closing them, is the Medicaid money they receive. When that goes, where are you going to put your ailing mother or grandmother?
I will tell you what you do. You are going to do it like they did it before Medicaid. When I was a young kid, it was not unusual to go visit someone, and in the front room there would be the hospital bed, the grandmother, and the mother was taking care of the person and that was healthcare back then. But after Medicaid, we were able to create a much more effective healthcare system.
And this will touch not just the very poor; this touched working families. It is the only way they can keep, really, their mother or father or older relative or a child with a very serious illness in a safe, protected place where they can receive appropriate care.
Three in seven Medicaid recipients in Rhode Island are working-age adults with disabilities. This is a situation where these people, because of their physical limitations, cannot work and need assistance. Some are severely disabled, others are significantly disabled, and they are going to be left, literally, out in the cold.
I must say there is a corollary here because just a few days ago, the President announced that he was going to take the IDEA education program and move it into the Department of Health, which at the same time is trying to shed thousands and thousands of workers. So my fear, of course, is that--again, going back into my youth, the fifties and the sixties--that children with disabilities will be sitting in the back of the room by themselves trying to keep themselves occupied because what we have created through IDEA--a system of education tailored to the individual child's disability--will be unsupportable.
And that is the kind of damage he is doing. It is the working people. It is
So we are in a situation now where we are basically undercutting our healthcare system, and it is not just these people who feel it. Everyone will feel it. If these Medicaid cuts go through, it will create so much turmoil in my State that our healthcare delivery system will be under great pressure--but, I think, so much pressure that it will not work.
Where do people go when they don't have healthcare? They go to the emergency room. So if you or I or somebody who might even have healthcare insurance and we have a serious problem, well, we can go to the emergency room and just get in the back of the line that is going all the way around the block and through the parking lot and everyplace else because these hundreds of thousands of people without healthcare, that is where they will have to go when it is so painful they can't go to work.
This is a disaster in the making. And, again, we saw last week and weeks before, President Trump talking about, ``I am going to put tariffs in and we are going to fix the whole economy.'' Nonsense. It is a disaster. It is killing our markets.
And, once again, ``Oh, I am going to go in there and take out Medicaid,'' et cetera, et cetera. It will be a disaster. I think we must avoid it.
We are better off because of Medicaid--better healthcare outcomes in this country. It is a different country, literally, than it was prior to the introduction of Medicaid, and we are better for it. It provides healthcare coverage, for example, for 17 million women of reproductive age so they can have the healthcare they need. And it helps families grow and prosper. And by making seniors and people with disabilities get the care they need, we are, I think, living up to the aspirations of this country, which is to ensure that those who need care get care.
You know, there have been a lot of men and women who served in the Armed Forces of the United States. I was proud to do it myself. And they weren't risking their lives so that a very wealthy individual could have five Mercedes rather than four. They were risking it so kids could have healthcare who needed it, so that their mother and father could have a place to be when they were sick and ill in their older years. And what we are doing? We are forgetting that sacrifice. We are saying: No, we are just here to pay off the rich people, the rich people who paid so much through the President's campaign to get him elected.
The one thing I want to emphasize, which is very important and often overlooked--going back to Rhode Island--74 percent of adults on Medicaid are working in my state. There is this insidious notion that this is just a free giveaway to people who don't work, who don't deserve it, et cetera. That is why we can get rid of it.
Seventy-four percent of the adults in Rhode Island on Medicaid are working, and they are working very hard. By the way, my guess is they are not getting a big benefit from these tax cuts because they are minimum wage or a little bit more.
So we are really doing something that is so unjust and, I believe, un-American in rewarding the wealthy--some of whom have worked hard to get it, some of whom just were lucky enough to be born to the right parents. And we are giving them a fortune, and we are taking away basic healthcare from working men and women.
We are in a very, very difficult situation. I don't think we can touch Medicaid, for the moral reasons I tried to suggest and for the economic reasons.
If those 74 percent of Medicaid adults in Rhode Island who are working can't get to work because they are ill, how do we get the jobs done? We don't.
The impact on the Nation in terms of these cuts is going to be horrendous, and this impact is going to be everyplace in the country. I have talked a lot about Rhode Island, but one of the ideas the Republicans are advancing to cut Medicaid is to eliminate the Medicaid expansion provided for under the Affordable Care Act.
Now, according to the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this cut would cost 41 States over $44 billion. States would have to increase their share of Medicaid spending by 25 percent. States like North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, and Nebraska would see their costs go up by more than 30 percent.
So I hope my colleagues from these States are ready, willing, and able to go out and tell their constituents: Your healthcare costs are going up 30 percent.
Now, obviously, I oppose this resolution that is being proposed. We have to do more, not less. And it is not just about the moral commitment I feel we have to people who need healthcare coverage; it is about the economics of caring for people early before it becomes more expensive, providing facilities for people who need those facilities rather than letting them languish at home.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
Mr. President, I am joining my colleagues today because Nevada's healthcare and America's healthcare is really not up for negotiation.
On Wednesday--and I want to recognize this--Senate Republicans released their budget plan to pay for President Trump's billionaire tax cuts. You have heard everybody talking about that. We have been on the floor. This is so important for the American public to understand what is at stake because, really, we can't let them fool you with some bureaucratic language to make them seem less devastating than these impacts really are or to use some sort of math gimmick.
Here are the facts--and let me say, on April 3, 2025, we just received from the Joint Committee on Taxation that which shows that President Trump and his Republican followers in the Senate really want to add almost $7 trillion to our national debt. The Republican plan to extend the 2017 Trump tax law will cost $5.5 trillion, including interest, and the budget resolution Senate Republicans introduced this week allocates an additional $1.5 trillion for tax breaks to be crafted by the Finance Committee, Republicans, and the Trump administration. This brings a total cost for over 10 years of the Republican tax plan to about $7 trillion--$7 trillion in deficit and debt. They are doing this to give tax cuts to billionaires. In order to pay for it, one of the things--and you are hearing us talk about this--is they want to slash Medicaid in this country by almost $1 trillion. You have heard this term ``$880 billion'' because that is what the House has sent to their committee to say we need to find some way to pay for these $7 trillion in tax cuts that we want to give to billionaires.
Now, Nevadans and so many across the country are being told these cuts are going to come from cracking down on waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid. Well, that would be great if it were true. Let me just put the fine print on this. I am all for getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse within government programs, and I know that many States-- actually, all States--including the Attorney General's Office in the State of Nevada, actually have a Medicaid fraud unit that goes after that fraud and waste that we see across the country. Every State has one.
But here is the simple truth: We are not going to find $880 billion in pay-fors by only cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid. To shrink this essential program down by nearly $1 trillion, President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress actually have to gut Medicaid. There is no other way around it. That is what they have to do. And that is not just a talking point from the Democrats. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office--their analysis--confirmed that Republicans would have to make the largest cuts in Medicaid history to meet their budget's $880 billion target.
Now, here is what I know--and you are hearing from all of our colleagues tonight, and you will hear this as we go into the votes that the Republicans want to take on this. I don't care whether you are from a red State, a blue State, or if you live in an urban area or in a rural area. Medicaid cuts
You heard my colleague from Rhode Island say this, and I also want to dispel this notion that people on Medicaid are somehow lazy, and they don't want to work, and they are just somehow milking the system. Let me be very clear: Nearly half of all Nevada Medicaid enrollees--that is 380,000 people--are people with jobs and their dependents.
Now, I want to put a fine point on this because I have to just call this out. This is just a crazy notion because I have met these families. I met a woman. She and her husband are working. They are both working full time. Their daughter has a rare disease. Without Medicaid, they would not be able to afford the medication and access to healthcare that she needs.
I have visited, in my State, clinics--FQHCs, clinics--federally qualified health centers--in the north and the south. I was in the Northern Nevada one just 3 weeks ago. I was looking at the individuals who were coming in for care, and I asked them: How would you be impacted by Medicaid? Not only would it devastate this health center, but I said: Who are these people who are coming to you? Do you know who they are? They are people who are working at Amazon. They are people who are working at Amazon and Walmart who have to get Medicaid because the billionaire owners of these organizations don't care enough to provide them healthcare. This is outrageous, but these are the people whom we are talking about.
Let me just say, last month, I met with a group of obstetricians from Northern Nevada. Medicaid is the largest payer for maternity services in my State. In 2023, there were 13,206 babies and their mothers who had access to essential healthcare. Nevada Medicaid does postpartum coverage up to 12 months, thanks to the American Rescue Plan, and now the Republicans and Donald Trump want to take it all away.
I know I am not the only State that is dealing with this, and I will tell you--and some of my colleagues I know, and I have talked to them. Whether you are Republican or Democrat, we have talked about this. It is devastating for our urban areas, and it would devastate my rural communities and every rural community across this country. If you live in a rural community in my State, you have very little access to healthcare so you want to keep those clinics open because, if you don't, then you are driving 4 hours just to get your healthcare somewhere if--if--you have the ability to get there and to drive there.
So I know it is not unique, and my hope is that my colleagues and my Republican colleagues who care like I do--and I know they do about their constituents--are going to address this issue, and we are going to work together so we can protect Medicaid.
But I would like the opportunity to engage in a colloquy with one of my colleagues who is here today, the Senator from Michigan.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
To the Senator from Michigan, Senator Slotkin, I know, like my State, they call it a swing State. It is a swing State. We have voters we represent who are Republicans, Democrats, Independents. It really isn't about your party; it is about healthcare and access to healthcare in this country. So, to my colleague from Michigan, I am curious what she is seeing and the impact that the Medicaid cuts that we are talking about would have to your constituents, the people you represent in Michigan.
Thank you, Senator.
I mean, I think what we are all here talking about into the dead of night is this idea of whom we want to be as a nation when it comes to providing healthcare.
Do we believe that the greatest country in the world should be able to treat the people who need help in our country or are we OK with the poorest among us, the weakest among us--those who are disabled, those who are elderly, those who are children--just not having access to care?
As the Senator said, when you look around at the math--right?--this isn't a political statement. The math of needing to find $880 billion with a ``b''--the math just doesn't work without gutting Medicaid. I think it is important to understand, at least in my State, that this isn't just about people who have Medicaid as their primary insurance, right? We have 10 million people in Michigan, and 2.6 million people are on Medicaid. The vast majority are children, right? They are people who can't live up to work requirements, people who just happen to be young, people who happen to be born where they were born. Thirty-seven percent of all of our births in Michigan are handled and covered by Medicaid, and two out of every three of nursing home elderly are covered by Medicaid. So it is not just about the people who are receiving direct care; it is about what Medicaid reimburses in funds.
It is the idea that 65 percent of our nursing homes could potentially go under if they don't get this funding. It is the idea that our rural hospitals from Hillsdale to Marquette, MI, have come to see me, and they say: Look, this is--we are not Democrats; we are conservative people, but if you take away this reimbursement, we will collapse. They were already suffering after COVID, and they are barely hanging on. So access to rural hospitals is something we are deeply, deeply worried about.
I think the bigger question is, Who do we believe we are, and do we have a commitment to serve and protect and provide basic healthcare to people in our States?
Now, you mentioned this, but I think it is important to realize that, with a number that big, we are not just talking about Medicaid. There is a real risk of Medicare Part D being touched--the prescription drug piece of that--and the Affordable Care Act, which so many people depend on, the many, many people being cut off from that at the end of the year. The math just doesn't work.
So what we are really talking about is, in the State of Michigan and in the United States, the potential for either people to lose their coverage or to have the price of their coverage go up because everyone who is talking about these Medicaid cuts back home has also mentioned, by the way, if we don't get the Medicaid reimbursement at our hospital, I am just going to charge more to the people who have insurance. There are going to be more people in my ER. I am going to have to pass that expensive cost off to customers who do have health insurance.
So it is just important to understand the full spectrum of what we are talking about here. Now, I am sure you have heard a ton of personal stories, right? It is important to understand that we are giving a talk on the Senate floor, and we are talking about numbers, but at the end of the day, these are human beings, and I am sure your phones are as flooded as mine are with people who want to tell their personal stories.
I will say, for me, it feels like ``Groundhog Day'' because I decided to run in 2018 for the very issue of healthcare because I happened to live through my mother getting stage IV ovarian cancer without having insurance. She had no insurance.
That first month of that terminal diagnosis, where you are desperate to get her tests and coverage and some kind of emergency surgery, you are using your credit cards, you are doing whatever you can while you are just feeling completely lost that you know your mother is going to die. That feeling is the worst feeling I have ever experienced, and it is what we are proposing to millions of additional Americans by the end of this year.
I am sure you heard a lot of personal stories on your phones. I don't know if you want to walk through a couple of
That is right. And I thank my colleague from Michigan because it is true. I mean, I can tell you, in February, I spoke with Madison from Nevada. She has stiff-person syndrome. This is the disease that impacts all her muscles and her breathing, and she has had to be on a ventilator seven times. She wouldn't be here today without Medicaid, which provides her with home healthcare.
Madison's sister Trisha was with her that day when she had to deal with such--and this is trauma. Healthcare is trauma in somebody's life. If Madison's Medicaid coverage ends, she would have to go live with her sister and depend on her for care. She would be forced to move away from her community and her whole life. Madison needs, really, Medicaid to live her life to the fullest.
Like my colleague from Michigan says, these are real people that will be impacted. And I know she is seeing the same.
I do want to pose for her this thought, though, that it is not just the individuals. We know there is real-life impact, and we see it. We hear it in our offices. We are getting those calls. We are meeting with individuals. We know them. We know them. They are our neighbors. They are our friends. We know them when we are home.
Here is what people forget, though. I know in Nevada we already don't have enough providers in Medicaid. We don't have enough providers in the program to begin with.
Expanding the number of healthcare providers in Nevada really has been a priority of mine. That is why I am leading legislation-- bipartisan legislation--with my colleague Senator Cassidy from Louisiana to support graduate medical education programs.
But here is the deal: If Medicaid funding in Nevada is cut, not only will those rural health clinics close that I talked about, but here is the thing people forget: We would have fewer providers because they would not be incentivized to come to my State and treat patients. They are going to figure out where they can go and still survive. Remember, our providers have still to survive and make a living, and they want to treat patients. So we are going to have a provider issue in my State.
I don't know if that is an issue for Michigan, but it is something that goes hand in hand with Medicaid cuts because I hear from my providers as well.
Yes. We talked about rural hospitals. I think, again, even if you are not on Medicaid, you have never signed up, you have never been in a low point in your life where you have needed a bridge, you have never had a child with a disability, you have just never touched the system, I guarantee you the hospitals that you depend on, the clinics that you depend on, the nursing homes that you depend on for your mom, your dad are dependent on Medicaid. I guarantee it.
And what we are hearing from our rural hospitals is: Look, we are the only hospital in 3 hours where you can get care. If we go, where do our people go? Where do we tell them to go?
If you are delivering a baby and you have to come off the Upper Peninsula into the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, there is just no way that we can function that way. So it is not just about, as you say, individuals--although, those stories are striking--it is about access to care for everybody.
I was talking to a doctor from the Lansing Care Free Medical Clinic. It is completely Medicaid covered. It is the folks who are left out of the system. He will just close. We will have clinics just close. So I think we are talking about something that, again, comes to the heart of who we are as a community.
I will also just say, I think it is important to put a warning label on it, and then I will turn it to you to maybe finish out.
There is a lot of magic math going on right now on the other side of that.
How do you take a group of people who both want to cut Medicaid in a devastating way, want to cut other healthcare in a devastating way, and match them up with a bunch of people who say, ``I can't,'' colleagues on the other side of the aisle who say, ``I can't accept cuts like that''? How do you balance two completely different factions in the same party? And it happens. Right?
What, normally, we would see is tough choices being made, right? Either the other side of the aisle is going to acknowledge we have to make these devastating cuts, or they are not going to cut them. But what we see now is that third secret option, which is magic math, which is: We are going to tell you we are not cutting anything, but we are going to quietly make the math just work so that we are actually cutting all these things, we are able to reap the benefits, or we push those cuts out to the outyears. So you don't notice them today, but maybe later, maybe after other elections, you are going to feel those Medicaid cuts.
So I guess my big warning label on the whole story here is that there is magic math going on from beginning to end on this package.
And don't be fooled. They are coming for your healthcare. You are either going to be paying more, or you are going to lose your coverage. That is just a fact based on the math that they put out publicly and voted on today.
So I thank my colleague for the opportunity to do my first colloquy. I didn't know this was a thing that we could do. Thank you for giving me that opportunity, and I will let you finish us out.
Thank you, the great Senator from Michigan.
Let me say, I am so pleased that she brought this up because it is a gimmick. It is a gimmick that they are playing right now that somehow the $7 trillion in tax cuts that they want to give to billionaires is not going to add to our deficit or debt.
Remember, these are the Republicans, the party of fiscal responsibility, and it is not going to add to our deficit or our debt.
This is the perfect example. I have read this in the papers--a perfect example of what this means. This is like you are a parent, and you have put your daughter through college for 4 years. She comes home, and she says: Oh, well, you are already paying for it. So it is not really an additional cost for you. So I am just going to stay home and not work, and you just continue to pay the same amount that you were paying for college, and I will just live off of that. That was a great example one of our papers put out--a journalist put out--because that is exactly what the Republicans are trying to do here. This is it.
And, remember, they are next going to come and try to lift the debt ceiling--more debt--to pay for this. This is the party of fiscal responsibility--think about this--at a time when our economy is already in a free fall because of these crazy tariffs.
And, by the way, if you care about your retirement and your 401(k), you are watching that stock market because that is in free fall. That is what this administration, that is what these Republicans are bringing you.
But, remember, when they started, they got handed an economy from the previous administration that was going strong. They had just come out of a pandemic and were trying to turn everything around. Was it perfect? No. But we were working on addressing the challenges facing this country.
I know. I know my colleague from Michigan knows this. Our family's prices are too high. Costs are high. We have got to focus on them. We have to lower those costs. These tax cuts should be about them, more money in their pocket.
We started doing that around healthcare, capping the cost of insulin, making sure that those Big Pharma companies would negotiate with us, and we can keep those prescription drugs down. We started that process. We have more to do. I know that.
But when President Trump came into office, the first thing he said was he was going to lower those costs for our families. That is not his priority, and that is not what he is doing. And that is why we have to shine a light on this.
That is why I am so proud of my colleagues for standing up and making sure the American public knows that they are coming after your healthcare, and they are coming after your retirement, and they are coming after you so that they can pay for these tax cuts for billionaires.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. President, I rise today for the third time this evening
Earlier this evening, I talked about the impact that cuts to Medicaid would have on children and babies and then about the impact that cuts to Medicaid would have on seniors and older adults.
But in my home State of Wisconsin, about a quarter of the population lives in rural areas, or roughly 1.4 million people do. And across the United States, about 60 million people live in rural areas.
When I travel around Wisconsin, I hear about several challenges that our rural communities face, from the lack of high-speed broadband to ensuring businesses have enough workers to thrive. But the No. 1 challenge that I hear about, time and again, is about rural access to healthcare.
Wisconsinites in rural communities face long drives and wait times to see a doctor. And for specialized healthcare, many of my constituents are looking at hours in the car just to get the care that they need and that they deserve.
That is why I have made it my mission to lower healthcare costs and expand care across the State, but especially for critical-access hospitals in our rural communities.
I am proud of our work because I know what a lifeline our rural hospitals are for Wisconsinites, from emergency care to having a place to get regular checkups. But I know we have work to do.
In the past 10 years, 120 rural hospitals have either closed or ceased offering inpatient services across this country. That is 120 communities and hundreds of thousands of people whose healthcare options have diminished or vanish overnight.
Most recently, in the State of Wisconsin, the closure of two HSHS hospitals and more than a dozen--well, over a dozen--clinics in Western Wisconsin left 1,400 workers out of a job and thousands of Wisconsinites with less access to emergency care, inpatient beds, mental health care, treatment for opioid addiction, and labor and delivery services.
Nearly half of all rural hospitals nationwide operate at a deficit, especially in States like Wisconsin that have not taken up the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion option for adults.
In a struggle to keep their doors open, many rural hospitals opt to close less lucrative units, such as maternity wards. That means women driving further for prenatal checkups or to give birth.
For the hospitals left and places that provide care, there has largely been one saving grace: Medicaid. Medicaid--and Medicaid expansion, in particular--is a crucial funding source for cash-strapped rural hospitals. And it makes sense. Children and people in rural areas are more likely to be enrolled in Medicaid than those in suburban and urban areas.
In 10 States and Territories, more than half of Medicaid and CHIP enrollees live in rural areas, including 1 in 3 children in Wisconsin's rural communities.
Medicaid ensures access to a critical range of services for people living in our rural areas, including covering nearly half of all births.
And, like other States, our rural hospitals are already too few and far between. Closing any more down would be devastating for people's health and our economy. But those are the consequences we face if Donald Trump and Republicans cut Medicaid to pay for their billionaire tax cuts.
It is not just blue States. It is not just big cities that should be bracing for impact if Republicans get their wish.
Massive cuts to Medicaid will undoubtedly force more rural hospitals to shutter. That means more Americans suffering from a stroke or heart attack not getting the lifesaving care they need until it may be too late. That means more children in rural communities not getting to regular checkups, and it means more expectant mothers facing roadblocks to getting prenatal care.
Let's be clear. The health and lives of rural Americans are on the chopping block if Republicans and Donald Trump pass their plan to gut Medicaid--and all to make superwealthy Americans even richer. It is wrong, and I for one plan to fight back.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. President, I rise in strong opposition to our colleagues' budget, the Republican budget, the Trump budget and plan where billionaires win and families lose.
We are voting on this budget resolution because our colleagues are once again telling us whose problems they are focused on solving, and-- spoiler alert--it is not the problems of everyday Americans. Two-thirds of these tax cuts go to billionaires.
After an election where the American people sent a clear message that they were concerned about the high price of essentials like healthcare, my Republican colleagues are focused on another round of tax cuts for billionaires. This proposal gives the top 0.1 percent of income earners a new tax break worth an average of $180,000. It gives a $50 million tax break to Elon Musk over the next 10 years. That is right--10 years, $50 million. I bet a lot of Americans would like that, but it is going to Elon Musk. And it pays for it by threatening the healthcare of 80 million Americans, including 31 million children.
This is not what Americans signed up for when they voted. I have heard this from constituents. I know because some of the people who--a number of them, a lot of them--voted for Donald Trump and me--what did they want? They wanted us to work on costs. They wanted us to bring down the cost of groceries and bring down the cost of healthcare, bring down the cost of everything from housing to childcare. They wanted us to stand up for them. Instead, we get this billionaire tax scam bill.
So let's talk about Medicaid. It is not maybe the first word on everyone's minds when they wake up in the morning because sometimes people don't know that Medicaid is helping their parents and their grandparents pay for their assisted living.
In my case, I knew that my dad was in assisted living that was paid for by his savings--he had late-onset Alzheimer's--and I knew the exact day when that savings would run out. He got married three times. That is another story. But he had limited savings, and the savings would get him through a certain date, and then Medicaid would kick in. That was the date when he was going to actually have to move, and I found another place for him.
He actually died a year before that happened. We miss him every single day. But I knew that Medicaid was there for him when those savings ran out, that he had a place to go. It might not have been the place that he had been at for a few years, but it was a place that was safe for him.
Medicaid provides healthcare for 20 percent--one in five--of the people in rural Minnesota, and it provides the long-term care for one out of two--50 percent--of the people in my State who are in long-term care. It is pretty important.
About 2 weeks ago, I went on a 14-county tour in rural Minnesota. I went to a number of senior facilities and assisted living facilities and heard their stories. So many of them needed Medicaid. But this partisan budget would force rural hospitals to shut their doors, and it would be particularly dangerous for people with chronic conditions and families caring for a child with a rare disease--all to pay for more than $2 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest people in our country.
Slashing Medicare and Medicaid would devastate families across our country. These are programs that millions of people rely on, like our neighbors, like our parents, like our grandparents. This is real, and I think people know that. They understand that.
I think about a constituent from Inver Grove Heights, MN, who told me that Medicaid helps her to afford the cost of her father's memory care. She said:
I think about what I heard from another constituent--a working mom of two--whose parents rely on Medicaid for healthcare. She told me she doesn't think it is fair to shift the cost of care to families like hers to pay for tax cuts to the wealthy.
You know, that is the incredible thing about democracies: People write
In this email, she said:
I couldn't agree more.
Today, the day has been a really hard time. I was on a TV program earlier, and there were a lot of major Wall Street traders--Jim Cramer--who are experts on Wall Street, and they talked about what a devastating day this has been. This was actually the toughest day, the biggest tumble the stock market has taken since 2020 in the pandemic. But this was not a pandemic. This was not a global pandemic. This was a self-inflicted wound from the President of the United States, and it, sadly, affected people not just on Wall Street but on Main Street.
We call this the Trump tariff tax, TTT. Easy to remember: Trump tariff tax. Estimates are now, based on the announcement made yesterday, that this is a $4,000 tax per average American family; it is a $20,000 additional fee on every single home that someone wants to buy--that is the average; thousands of dollars for a car. Why? Because our supply chains are forever integrated with the rest of the world. We get stuff from Canada.
We were able to see four of our colleagues stand up and vote with all Democrats to say that the basis for the Trump tariff tax on Americans, based on Canada, was wrong.
And we actually made a statement last night, and then what happens? We see the effects of the Trump tariff tax: 4 percent down in the stock market. Some of it is 5 percent down.
The Republican budget doubles down on this because while we are seeing this assault on Americans' savings and on average American families who work hard every single day, we are also now hearing about a budget that would add, in 30 years, $37 trillion to the debt--$37 trillion to the debt--while cutting Medicaid.
Why do I say that? Because in order to meet the targets that were outlined over in the House, the Congressional Budget Office, which has long been nonpartisan--used by Democrats and Republicans in Congress-- has made it clear that this would have to involve cuts to Medicaid. Add that to the firings at the Department of Health and Human Services that will undercut health services and research.
I just met with a man this weekend from a small town right close to Brainerd, MN, whose wife had just died in January. In order to figure out the death benefit, what he got under Social Security, he first emailed. He is very much with it at age 79. It took too long. On and on. He called--hours and hours. He went into the office. He drove 30 miles. He was asked to show his ID online. It went on and on and on for days, until he called our office, and we got involved and tried to help him--a man who is grieving, who just lost his wife. That is what these cuts are going to mean for regular people.
Yes, it is a disaster for Wall Street, but it is more of a disaster on Main Street.
For decades--and here is one example--Big Pharma companies had a sweetheart deal written into law that allowed them to charge seniors whatever they wanted for lifesaving prescription drugs. Along with many of my Democratic colleagues, I led the bill to have, finally, Medicare negotiations under Medicare Part D.
What happened? The last administration took this on, the top 10 drugs--everything from Eliquis, to Januvia, to Xarelto, to Jardiance. They finally negotiated the prices and negotiated prices for those 10 drugs--which went down 60 percent, 70 percent--and will save 9 million seniors $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs in just the first year alone. No one has refuted these stats because this was the negotiation.
Now this torch, this incredible effort to finally bring down pharmaceutical prices, has been passed on to this administration. They have been given 15 drugs--that is the next allotment--including Ozempic, to negotiate the prices down for seniors. They also have to do it the year after that and the year after that.
There is no sign, based on testimony in the Health Committee, based on what we have seen out there, that they are going to have the wherewithal to do this. I hope they do, but there is no sign that they are going to do this.
I see that Senator Welch just entered the Chamber. He was the lead author on this bill in the House of Representatives and understands exactly what I am talking about.
That is an example, when you look at Medicaid and the use for, yes, children with disabilities, kids throughout our land, but also our seniors for nursing homes and assisted living, then you look at Medicare and how important that is, then you look at the progress we have made on things like prescription drugs--all of these are on the line at the same time Americans have seen the biggest drop to their savings, the biggest drop to the stock market, a self-inflicted wound, a reckless act based on things that Donald Trump has said to his--I don't know--the people he hangs out with, his friends.
Well, the people that voted for him in my State did not sign up for this.
Instead of building on our progress, Republicans are driving up costs by not standing up on these tariffs--although four of them did--on Canada, by not standing up when it comes to this assault on programs for our seniors, like Medicaid.
This is unacceptable, and we should not be here advancing policies that are going to force more Americans to have to choose between filling their prescriptions and putting food on their table. Too many Americans struggle with the cost of healthcare. Instead of looking out for billionaires, let's look out for them.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, I am really delighted to be here with my colleagues Senator Klobuchar and Senator Warnock. I know it is an incredibly important issue for all of America. It is not a red State, blue State situation. It is about something that is near and dear to the heart of the Presiding Officer, the doctor from Kansas: That is healthcare.
Healthcare is in jeopardy, particularly Medicaid. Medicaid is healthcare. It is healthcare for kids. It is healthcare for many low- income seniors. It is healthcare for 80 to 90 million Americans. It is healthcare for folks who must live in nursing homes. They are at that stage in life where what keeps them alive and allows their kids to visit are Medicaid paid-for nursing homes.
In fact, in Vermont, two out of three of our seniors who are in nursing homes are there only because of Medicaid. So this is important to families, to kids, to seniors. It is part of our healthcare system.
And what is of concern, I think, to all of us--and I really want to emphasize I think it is all of us, not the Democrats versus the Republicans--is wanting to have a healthcare system that is going to be there when people need it, that people are not denied access to healthcare because they are poor kids, that they are not denied access to nursing home care because they have run out of their lifesavings.
We want to make certain that the healthcare needs of our children and our seniors, disabled children, disabled adults--we want to make sure those healthcare needs are met. We have to do that. It is the mark of a functioning and caring society.
There is not anybody on either side of the aisle that doesn't want to do the best we can, not just for our kids but for the kids that live in our community; that want to do the best we can, not just for our parents but for all the parents that live in a community; that want to do the best for all folks who are disabled and need the special requirements that go along with life with a significant disability.
But here is where there is a difference: The tax bill that is being proposed that will lower taxes is going to be paid for, in significant part, by drastic cuts to the Medicaid budget, maybe up to $800 billion. And in fact, in the House version of the reconciliation bill, the Energy and Commerce Committee, on which I served when I was in the House and has jurisdiction over Medicaid, was instructed in that resolution to come up with about $800 billion in savings.
What is the purpose of those savings? It is not to lower the national debt. It is not to invest in research and development. It is not to provide universal affordable childcare for a family in medical need-- things that I think all of us absolutely need.
It is to fund a tax cut. Literally, it is to fund a tax cut. So then the question becomes: tax cut for whom? We have millions of taxpayers in this country with all different incomes, and that includes everyone from folks who are making 7 or 8 bucks an hour to $15 an hour, to middle-class families maybe with two folks working--a firefighter maybe and a teacher--might be making $150,000, and they have a couple of kids, still trying at the end of each month to pay the bills, put aside a little money for college, put a little money aside, hopefully, for a 2-week vacation at some point.
Or that tax cut can be designed so it goes to folks who have really been riding the wave of the financialization of the economy, folks who have become billionaires--God bless them--multinational corporations that have extremely strong balance sheets and really strong profits, companies that already saw a tax cut in the last tax bill that has exceeded what they even asked for.
So the question that is really before this Congress has to be put in very concrete terms. It is not, Are you for a tax cut? It is not, Are you for Medicaid? Because probably every single one of us on both sides of the aisle would say yes to a tax cut, and we would say yes to Medicaid.
But we have got to be candid with one another and with the American people that the tax cut that the majority is proposing, more than half of it is going to go to billionaires, multimillionaires, and to very, very profitable multinational corporations.
In the design of the ``pay-for,'' $800 billion is going to be taken away from the healthcare that provides essential healthcare to kids and to seniors and to disabled people.
So this is not really a question of, Are you for a tax cut? We all are. It is not really a question of, Are you for Medicaid? We all are. It is a question of the specific bill that is being proposed, which is a tax cut that is designed to lower taxes for very wealthy people who won't notice one way or the other at all whether they do or don't get yet another tax cut. They won't know it. It won't affect them. It won't in any way have an impact on how they live their life day-to-day. It won't have any impact on their ability to put money aside for their kids to go to college. It won't have any impact on their ability to put money in a trust fund so their children and their grandchildren can live with total economic security. It will have no impact on that.
It will certainly have no impact on the improvement of our economy because that money won't be spent or saved rather than invested in the childcare that working families need. It won't be invested in the family leave that a parent needs when a spouse or a child becomes sick. It will have absolutely no impact on that.
So the question for us is, Why would we design a bill that is going to give a tax cut to folks that don't need it--in some cases, haven't even asked for it. It is not going to be reinvested in the economy to improve the well-being of our society through education or childcare or family leave.
But then we have the pretense that would be fiscally responsible and ``pay for'' the tax cut, but the way we are going to pay for the tax cut is taking away healthcare from people who desperately need it and can't afford it. That is what is up here. That is the question. It is not rhetoric. It is not about political principles.
This is about day in and day out survival for many American families who have absolutely no capacity financially to take care of a parent who is now in a nursing home or a parent--parents of a disabled child whose only lifeline to be able to care for that child is Medicaid.
Folks with a disabled child, as we know, it is an incredible challenge for them, and they meet it. It is amazing that a person, a family, they have the bad luck of having a disabled child, but they have the good heart that they can love that child as though it is the best child in the whole wide world. That is how they are. That is how Americans are. They accept what God gives them, and they love that child.
But it makes a difference whether they can live their life if they have Medicaid that helps get that wheelchair, that may help them with a van so they can go out as a family. That is literally what we are talking about. This is real. This is consequential. This is not about polls and who is ahead and who is up and who is down.
This is about a society, through the U.S. Senate, at this moment, that is making the decision that we are going to give tax cuts to people who don't need them, haven't asked for them, but whose political supporters here are demanding them on their behalf and give tax cuts to corporations that have had record profits at the expense of taking away the healthcare that families in your community and mine totally depend on.
This is wrong. This is wrong. The most elemental thing that a family needs is some security if they have a child or they have an elderly parent. They are not going to leave them out on the street and kick them aside. That is what is being proposed in this bill. That is what is being proposed.
I hope we come to our senses here, and we just start with the proposition that whatever it is we do, whatever tax policy we believe is in the best interest of the American people, we start with the commitment that however we implement that policy, it will do no harm to the children in your community and mine, to the folks in nursing homes in your community and mine. We will do no harm.
That, Mr. President, is why it is so essential that we defeat this proposal.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
Mr. President, I rise tonight in strong opposition to this awful, and, frankly, immoral budget. Recently, I was appointed to the Finance Committee of the U.S. Senate, and the reason why I wanted to serve on that committee is because I wanted to get a chance to shape the Nation's budget.
As I thought about all of the things that I have fought for long before I came to the Senate, access to healthcare, access to learning and early education for all of our children, ensuring that people could retire with dignity--as I thought about the things that I cared about, I wanted to serve in a place where I might have an impact on our Nation's budget.
And that is because, for me, a budget is not just a fiscal document, it is a moral document. It is not just numbers and figures. It is not just dollars and cents.
Show me your budget, and I will show you who you think counts and who doesn't. Show me your budget, and I will show you what you think matters and what doesn't. Show me your budget, and I will show you your priorities.
Jesus said:
And I have to say that if this budget that is being proposed were an EKG, it would suggest that the U.S. Congress has a heart problem and is in need of moral surgery. Why else would you propose, among other things, to cut up to $880 billion from Medicaid?
I could talk about many aspects of this budget tonight, but I will just stick with Medicaid, programs that provide healthcare to the most vulnerable citizens, the children, to the severely disabled, to seniors in nursing homes. In fact, 71 percent of all Medicaid enrollees in Georgia are children--71 percent. And I think it is important to underscore that because sometimes when we use these terms ``Medicaid,'' there may be folks at home wondering, well, who are we talking about? Who are these people? Well, 71 percent of them are your children.
And so this budget is dangerous. It is cynical. It is wrong-headed. I believe in addressing waste and fraud and abuse, and I would sign up quickly to deal with that in our government.
But there isn't enough waste, fraud, and abuse to cut $880 billion out of Medicaid. And that is not just me saying that. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the proposed GOP budget would require cuts to the Medicaid people rely on. So don't be fooled. Don't be tricked by the funny math, by the games to cover up what is really happening here. And if I were them, I would be ashamed of it and trying to hide it too.
But they can't hide from the fact that they are about to take healthcare away from children. It is really that simple. And so why? Why are we cutting access to healthcare? A human
Well, the answer is, sadly, very simple: to pay for tax cuts to the richest of the rich, all while adding $5 trillion to the Nation's debt. Think about that. A plan that would cut healthcare to our most vulnerable citizens, including children living in the dawn of life and elders living in the twilight of life, while adding $5 trillion to the Nation's debt, $37 trillion potentially over 30 years, and so we are taking healthcare for children and then burdening them with the consequences of this terrible decision.
And so I rise tonight just to say that America is better than this. This is not who we are at our core. And the data demonstrates that the people--the people at home, ordinary folks don't want this. This is symptomatic of the ways in which the people's voices have been squeezed out of their democracy and the folks who are sent here to represent them are representing other interests.
And that is why every Sunday I return to my pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church. I am blessed to stand there. I am the preacher, but it is good to be in that atmosphere. It reminds me what ordinary people look like and their concerns and their needs. And sometimes, when I stand in that pulpit, I am reminded that Martin Luther King, Jr., who was copastor, said that of all the injustices, inequality in healthcare is the most shocking and the most inhumane.
It is the honor of my life to be able to stand there and preach every Sunday. The Gospel tells us about a man who healed the sick, even those with preexisting conditions, and never billed them for his services. And that is why I am a Matthew 25 Christian. My work is informed by the words of that Gospel.
And some asked the Master, when were You hungry? Lord, when were You thirsty? When were You a stranger? When were You sick?
And the answer came:
This is not for me simply a policy argument; it is a moral discussion. It is about who we are fundamentally. What is the character of our Nation? To center the 41 percent of Georgia children who rely on Medicaid, I think that is what keeping the faith looks like; to center the exhausted mom who is working multiple, unpredictable jobs but still needs Medicaid to get the healthcare she needs--many of the folks who need Medicaid go to work every day.
In Georgia, 600,000 folks who are in the Medicaid gap, all of this talk about work requirements, the overwhelming majority of those folks go to work every day or they are in school or they are taking care of a disabled person.
Keeping the faith means centering the Georgia seniors who rely on Medicaid to cover the cost of living in a nursing home. That is why in 2017, years before I knew I would even run for political office, let alone serve in the Senate, I came to this building, but I came as a faith leader. I came with other faith leaders across various religious traditions and people who claim no particular faith tradition but people of moral courage. And we gathered in the Rotunda, and they were discussing, back then another reconciliation bill. And, once again, that bill would cut the social safety net programs like Medicaid and food assistance.
And so we came here to bear witness to who we are at our best as a nation. And as we gathered in the Rotunda, the Capitol Police gathered, and we were singing, and we were praying. And they said: Sorry, you can't sing, and you can't pray in the Rotunda.
I thought to myself somebody needed to pray.
And they said:
What they didn't understand was that I had already been arrested. My mind and my imagination had been arrested by the words of Dr. King who taught us that the true measure of a person is not where he or she stands in moments of comfort and convenience but in moments of challenge and controversy. We are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, and whatever affects one affects all indirectly. My mind had already been arrested. My moral imagination had been arrested. And so that felt like a small price to pay.
And so I call on the people who are at home to call your Senator, call your Congress person, tell them that this is not right, it is not fair, it is not true to our highest values.
There are some 2,000 verses in the Scripture that tell us how to treat people who are in need, how to treat the poor; and maybe that is why faith leaders all across the State of Georgia have been reaching out to me in advance of this debate.
Atlanta Bishop Jack Lumanog from the Anglican Diocese of St. Ignatius Loyola reached out to me earlier this month, and here are some excerpts from the letter he sent to me. He said:
He says--
Thank you, Bishop Lumanog. You are not alone in your witness. Earlier in the year, the three largest Catholic organizations in the country-- the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Health Association, and Catholic Charities USA--urged lawmakers to protect and strengthen Medicaid as a matter of faith.
They wrote:
We are hearing from a range of faith leaders because they understand that the acid test of someone's faith is the depth of their commitment to the most marginalized members of the human family.
Nearly 2 million people in Georgia are enrolled in Medicaid; that is one in five Georgians. And 1.3 million children in Georgia are enrolled in Medicaid; that is over 40 percent of every Georgia child, two in every five children. A quarter of a million Georgia seniors rely on Medicaid, including those living in nursing homes, that is around one in seven Georgia seniors. And they are united in opposition to cuts to Medicaid. I hear their stories all the time. I want to just share a couple of them with you.
Bristeria was excited to learn that she would be expecting her first child, but her initial excitement quickly gave way to fear and anxiety as her pregnancy proved to be most difficult.
During the pregnancy, doctors needed to perform an emergency operation, followed by an unexpected C-section delivery. And at the time of her pregnancy, Bristeria was working a part-time job that did not offer health benefits.
Through family, friends, and coworkers, she discovered that she was eligible for Medicaid, which ultimately provided critical assistance in covering
She was both relieved and grateful that a difficult pregnancy ended in the birth of a healthy baby boy. Now she is the proud mother of two. She works full time as a deputy county clerk. She is now enrolled in an employer-provided health plan. But she remains forever grateful that Medicaid was there for her when she needed it.
It provided a temporary safety net amid a challenging pregnancy, and now her life is much better because of it.
Naomi enrolled in Medicaid after she lost her job when pregnant with her son Noah. Noah was born prematurely at just 26 weeks and lives with chronic and medically complex conditions that require round-the-clock care. Noah's Medicaid coverage is provided through a combination of innovative programs, including Georgia's Right from the Start initiative for comprehensive health services and the Katie Beckett waiver program for children with complex medical needs.
All over our country, there are children like Noah. His mom says:
Elisabeth from Ellijay, GA, says:
Finally, when Cindy was 17 years old--Cindy from Atlanta--she was a star athlete and a great student preparing to go to college and enroll in ROTC. Her parents, who are refugees from Vietnam, moved to the United States to give her a better life, and she wanted to make them proud.
But when she started feeling exhausted all the time and noticed swelling in her lymph nodes, she knew something was wrong. And after several visits to various doctors and the hospital, she was diagnosed with stage II non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Obviously, that was devastating news for her and for her family, but they were at least grateful that Medicaid would cover all the treatment Cindy needed to survive.
And just after Thanksgiving, her senior year in high school, Cindy started chemotherapy. Each session lasted 3\1/2\ hours, and she had to do them every other week for 6 months. She went to classes as much as she could, took the SAT, and continued her plans to go to college. She went to her senior prom, even though it was just 2 days after her chemotherapy.
But now Cindy is 30 years old. She is cancer free. She is fascinated by all things aerospace, and she formed a group at her school to advocate for a new major in the field. She says:
That is really the heart of it: Medicaid saves lives.
And so I wanted to share these stories tonight because these are the stories of ordinary people. These are the stories of the folks who will not be able to stand on the Senate floor, but they need a voice. These are their stories. But in a real sense, these are our stories because, as Dr. King said: We are ``tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one . . . affects all indirectly.''
We got to know this very well over the last few years, during the COVID-19 pandemic. A deadly airborne disease meant that if my neighbor was sick, I was potentially imperiled. That doesn't make my neighbor my enemy. That simply means I had an investment in my neighbor's health. My neighbor's healthcare was good for my health.
And so that is the spirit with which we ought to be addressing something as sacred as crafting a nation's budget. I need other people's children to be OK for my children to be OK. I need people with disabilities to be OK for my children to be OK. I need seniors at nursing homes to be OK for all of us to be OK. I need children with cerebral palsy to be OK for my children to be OK.
We need to look into each other's eyes and into the eyes of other people's children, and see our own.
So over the next few days, this body will be voting on a budget, and I submit that the budget says a whole lot about the body. It is a moral EKG, and the question is: Are we well or do we have a heart condition?
I submit that, for all of our challenges, we suffer not from a poverty of resources but a poverty of moral imagination. We are bigger, better, and stronger when our reach is wide and when we dare to build a nation that embraces all of our children. God gives us strength, grace, and moral courage to get it right.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.
Before he leaves the floor, I just wanted to thank my colleague from Georgia for the moral clarity of his remarks tonight.
It is interesting to think for a moment of what we are dealing with and what the context of this budget is. We are living in the wealthiest country in the world, but unlike almost any other industrialized country in the world, we don't provide healthcare to everybody in the United States. This is the wealthiest country in the world. Per capita, we are far wealthier than any other country in the world. And, yet, we made the decision not to provide healthcare to everybody.
And, shockingly, not only are we doing that, we are spending twice what any other industrialized country is spending on healthcare--for worse results.
Do you know that, today, in the United States of America, our life expectancy is 6 years shorter than if you live in an industrialized country in the world that has a universal healthcare system that costs half of what this healthcare system costs?
If you are African American in the United States of America, your life expectancy is 12 years shorter than if you live in a country that has a universal healthcare system that costs half of the one in the United States of America.
And those systems, by the way, are very different. Some of them are all public systems. Some of them are a combination of for-profit and nonprofit and government healthcare. But the thing they share in common is that everybody is covered and that they cost much less than the healthcare that is delivered in the United States of America.
I am sure my colleague from Georgia has the same experience I have in Colorado, which is to notice that every year it seems like healthcare actually becomes more scarce in America--less abundant--even though we are spending all that money. And don't even ask me about mental healthcare, which our families desperately need in the United States of America now. And as a former school superintendent, I can tell you our kids are facing a raging epidemic of mental health issues that are related to COVID, that are related to other challenges they are facing, that are related to the social media algorithms that are ripping their childhoods apart with absolutely no response from this place.
So that is the starting point. And I think I heard my colleague from Georgia talking about how Martin Luther King had said that inequality in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane of all. And I wonder if one of the things he was thinking is that it is shocking and inhumane, in the richest country in the world, that not everybody is covered, even though in every one of these other industrialized countries, people are covered.
And everybody in this room knows that no matter whether you are covered or whether you are not, if you have a sick child, you are going to try to get them a doctor. If you have a sick child, you are going to try to get them to the hospital, whether they are covered or whether they are not.
And one of the reasons why our healthcare system is so expensive is that people don't have primary care; that is to say, they don't have the ability to go in to see a doctor in a timely way, just to get a wellness checkup for themselves or for their kids, just to make sure that everything is OK, so they don't develop a chronic healthcare condition that makes the healthcare much more expensive on the other end and shortens their life.
That is why we have a 6-year life expectancy that is shorter than people in
And that is why this budget is so astonishing and so amazing. And I agree with my colleague from Georgia that every budget is a moral document. This document is an immoral document. This budget is an immoral budget. You would think that we lived in the poorest country in the world, not the richest country in the world, if you saw this budget.
There is no way that any mayor in Georgia or any mayor in Colorado, whatever party they are in, Democrat or Republican, would put a budget like this in front of their people. There is no way they would come to them and say: We are going to make life even harder for people who are even hanging on by their fingernails just to get the healthcare they get because, as my colleague from Georgia said, we are all sicker if kids don't get inoculated. We are all sicker if this country of ours doesn't have people that have primary care. It just gets more expensive if families have to go to the emergency room to get care for their children because they have no other way to get healthcare. That is what is going to happen.
Most of the people who are on Medicaid are children and senior citizens. That is who is on Medicaid--and disabled people and people who have spent their entire lifetime--they have spent their entire lifetimes working, and now they have spent their lifesavings down just for the privilege of spending the rest of their days in a nursing home, often in rural parts of our country, on Medicaid.
So this budget has these cuts to healthcare. It is a way of saying it. I mean, we call it Medicaid, but it is healthcare for poor children, for poor seniors, for working people, for disabled people, for people that are living in nursing homes that have no other options. It is their healthcare.
If you take this healthcare away, people are just going to get sicker. It is going to cost the society more. People are going to fill up these emergency rooms. We know that because people will try to get healthcare wherever they can, even if it is the most expensive way of doing it.
We would be a lot better off having a conversation about how to cover everybody in a way that costs us as little as it costs in other countries around the world.
But not only are we not having that discussion with this budget, we are having a discussion about a budget that cuts taxes and blows this massive hole in the deficit, no matter how much the healthcare cuts are, of about $4.6 trillion. And that is to extend the tax cuts that Donald Trump came here and passed in 2017.
This is another shocking part of this budget. You know, we have very significant problems in our economy.
This country relied, when I was growing up, on the idea that if you worked hard, you could get ahead; if you worked hard and your kids worked hard, they could live a better life than the life you lived. That was the American promise. That was the American promise.
Today, for the first time in American history, half the people that are 30 years old are going to make less money than their parents. Think about that. Half the people that are 30 years old in the country today are going to make less money than their parents did. If you look at young men in the United States of America, they are earning 40 percent less income today than they earned in 1976.
We tell ourselves that we are the land of opportunity. We need to be the land of opportunity, but we are seeing our economic mobility slide behind competition, from Southeast Asia to Europe. There is a lot of discussion these days about what the threats to our democracy are or the fact that our democracy is threatened. I don't think there is a greater threat to our democracy than the lack of economic mobility we have, than the fact that too many families in Colorado and across this country feel like their kids are not going to live a life as good as the life they live. In Colorado, there is not a county anymore where people feel like their lives are going to be better, where their kids' lives are going to be better than theirs.
When you lose that sense of opportunity, when you lose that sense that if you work hard, you are going to get ahead, that is a danger to democracy because, inevitably, somebody shows up, as President Trump did, and says: I alone can fix it. You don't need a democracy. You don't need the rule of law. You don't need this exercise in self- government. I can fix it. You should expect your private sector and your public sector to be hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly bankrupt.
That is a dark vision, but that is the dark vision that he was elected on twice.
I think we would be a lot better off trying to figure out how to create an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top; and an economy that, when people work hard, they feel like they know they will be able to propel their kids forward. It was an economy that reestablished the American dream for this entire country. We better do that. We better do that if we are going to have any hope of saving this democracy.
But here comes a budget where a massive hole is being blown into the deficit and is causing a proposal to cut healthcare for the poorest people in the country and the poorest children in the country--here is what it is doing. It is cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in America. Fifty percent of the benefit of this tax bill will go to the top 5 percent of Americans. Fifty percent of the benefit of this tax bill will go to the top 5 percent of Americans.
I have said it on the floor before. I am not going to dwell on it again. This is analogous. It is the same if a mayor in Denver or Grand Junction or Limon or Durango or Springfield came to see the citizens of those communities and said: I am going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before.
You ask them: What are you going to spend it on? I am worried about that. What are you going to spend that money on? Parks? Public safety? On the mental health challenges that I described earlier? On our infrastructure? Our roads? Our bridges? Our schools?
And the answer is: No, no, no.
Well, what are you going to spend it on?
We are going to give tax breaks to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in town and let it trickle down to everybody else.
That is the Trump tax policy. That was the Trump tax policy in 2017, and it is the Trump tax policy this year.
It is very unusual, by the way, to have a President who has been here twice with an interruption, but that is the case with President Trump. We now know the facts of the math that he claimed the last time.
He said last time that the tax cuts would pay for themselves. We know that they cost the country $4 trillion; that the sons and daughters of teachers and firefighters and police officers all over this country who are not going to benefit in a material way from the tax cuts are going to have to pay back the debt that is incurred to give them to people who, as the Senator from Georgia said, aren't even asking, really. Many of them know we are in this situation where we have the worst income inequality that we have had since the 1920s and that we should be thinking about how to build that middle class again, give people the chance to get into the middle class, which is what we should be focused on.
So there is a set of priorities here that somehow makes sense when it gets to Washington, DC, but surely doesn't make sense in the towns and cities of this country. There is a choice that would never be made--a choice to hurt the people that now are going to have to go without healthcare; a choice to blow a massive hole in the deficit--not to invest in the country but to cut taxes for the wealthiest people.
Why don't we have a tax cut for working people? Why don't we have a tax cut for the middle class? Why don't we expand the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit for working people here?
Mr. President, I am going to finish. I do want to read some letters that have been written to me from people in Colorado who are deeply concerned about these cuts to Medicaid.
I want to also say a word of thank-you to the people that have come to my townhalls--sometimes with their children, sometimes with their children with disabilities--to advocate on
There were so many people that wrote in. The No. 1 issue--when we have these townhalls, we write down the questions that are asked. The No. 1 issue is Medicaid because the people that have loved ones who are on the program know it is going to be cut, know that they have nowhere else to turn. That is why they are there at 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock at night with their children when their children should be home in bed, because they want people here to understand what it is going to mean to their families if these cuts go into place.
The first letter is from Barbara of Greenwood Village:
Eighty-six-year-old parents--
The next letter is from Michell in Thornton:
No family could afford.
The care I say that all of us deserve.
Erica from Johnstown:
And to be able to have his parent there to take care of him.
Samuel from Denver:
Welcome--
Mr. President, I can't tell you the number of parents I have met who have spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in care of their own children but who are able to do it because of the small payment that is made by Medicaid. What are these parents supposed to do if this is cut? How are we going to meet the moral obligation of this country to our children with this cut?
A letter from Brittny in Denver:
Barbara from Greenwood Village:
Sasha from Fountain:
It is a crisis. It is a crisis. It is a crisis in the richest country in the world. Now we are going to provoke this crisis. We are going to make it even worse. We are going to destabilize these families. For what--so we can give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America? Why don't you just not do that part of the bill? Why don't you just not do that part of the bill?
This economy has shoveled benefits for 50 years on the wealthiest people in our country. Do we want to compound that unfairness with a set of tax policies like the ones that are being pursued here and turn around and cut healthcare for the most vulnerable people in America?
If you are concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, go after waste, fraud, and abuse, but don't make people's lives even more painful. Don't make people's lives even more difficult. Don't force parents to actually leave their households when there is no one else to take care of their children.
No one would make these choices in one of our communities at home. I would like to hear a city council meeting where these were the choices that were being made: Cut electric for the poorest people in the country. Borrow as much money as we have ever borrowed. Give the benefit to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in town. It doesn't make any sense.
Here is a letter from Bryce in Denver:
She is from Denver--
I couldn't have said that better myself.
Nearly 1.3 million Coloradans like Kalyn rely on Health First Colorado and CHIP to get health coverage. Half a million of them are children. These cuts would affect more than half of Colorado's seniors who rely on Health First Colorado to help pay for nursing homes because they literally can't afford to die anywhere else. From birth to death, our Medicaid Programs are a lifeline for my constituents and for millions of Americans.
My colleague from Georgia started his speech by saying that a budget is a moral document. I could not agree with him more.
I think we should reconsider, in the face of the advocacy that we are hearing, whether these are the best choices we can make, and of course, they are not. In a rational world, we would be figuring out how to get everybody healthcare in this country and do it for less money than these other countries are spending, just as they are doing, and we would be able to use the savings from that to pay down our deficit if we wanted to do that or invest in our military if we wanted to do that or invest in our roads and our bridges if we wanted to do that or in the mental health of our children if we cared to do that. Those are the choices that we should be making tonight.
I want to finish this by thanking again the people who have come to my townhall meetings; to the people who have brought their loved ones, especially their children, to those townhall meetings; to the people who took the time to write, who have not given up on the idea that they can have a voice in this democracy and that the decisions that this place can make can actually align with the priorities that they have.
They are not asking for anything here except the chance to continue to take care of their children, to take care of their parents, to take care of their loved ones, and to be contributing members of our society. We should support their ambitions for themselves. We should support their ambitions for our country. We should find a better way of supporting them, and we should shelve this budget, which is going to do nothing but harm the American people.
I thank the Presiding Officer for his patience. I thank the staff for being here so late tonight even though tonight's lateness is going to be nothing compared to tomorrow night's lateness.
