Prayer
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will continue reading.
The assistant bill clerk continued with the reading of the amendment.
(The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore assumed the Chair.)
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. President, I would like to start by just taking a moment to thank the clerks who stayed up all night reading the amendment and getting us to this point. I know it was a long night and that we are not finished yet, but I want them to know that the Senate appreciates their dedication, their stamina, and their service.
In just a moment, I am going to make a point of order against the substitute amendment that I offered on behalf of Chairman Graham. I believe the Chair should rule that there is no point of order against the amendment because, under the Budget Act, the Senate looks to the Budget Committee to assess the budgetary effects of an amendment. Basically, this has to do with the current policy baseline that we decided to use in the budget resolution for this bill and how we handle points of order related to it. This is an issue that, I think, we need to deal with right off the bat.
Therefore, I make a point of order under section 313(b)(1)(E) of the Congressional Budget Act against substitute amendment No. 2360.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the Congressional Budget Act and the precedents of the Senate, the chair must rely on determinations made by the Budget Committee in assessing the budgetary effects of the amendment.
Section 312 of the Budget Act states:
The point of order is not well-taken.
The Democrat leader.
Mr. President, I appeal the ruling of the Chair, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
The yeas and nays are ordered.
The appeal is debatable for 1 hour under the Act.
The Democrat leader.
Mr. President, first, let me thank everyone who stayed overnight to take part in the reading of this bill--my colleagues, the cloakrooms, the floor staff--everyone who made it possible.
I would say this to the cloakrooms and, particularly, to our great floor staff: You are all amazing. You are the unsung heroes of what goes on here. Without you, none of us could do our work. So thank you for your dedication, your excellence, your perseverance, your strength.
Senate Democrats will now commence with four parliamentary inquiries to show the hypocrisy of what Republicans are trying to do here in the Senate and to expose how they are trying to hide the true costs of their billionaire giveaways to the American people. I thank my colleagues who will speak momentarily, as well as all of my colleagues who have come to the floor, as we debate this bill before vote-arama.
Before I yield to them, I just want to hammer home exactly what is going on here in the Senate for the people back home.
Republicans are about to pass the single most expensive bill in U.S. history to give tax breaks to billionaires, while taking away Medicaid, SNAP benefits, and good-paying jobs for millions of people. The CBO, just this morning, said it will explode the debt by $3.3 trillion, and they said it will likely cost more than that over time--closer to $4 trillion. Rather than being honest with the American people about the true costs of their billionaire giveaways, Republicans are doing something the Senate has never, never done before: deploying fake math and accounting gimmicks to hide the true cost of their bill.
Look, Republicans can use whatever budgetary gimmicks they want to try and make the math work on paper, but you can't paper over the real- life consequences of adding tens of trillions to the debt--sky-high interest rates, higher borrowing costs for cars, for homes, for credit cards. Americans are going to feel this, unfortunately, everywhere they look. Americans' household wealth will be permanently hobbled. There aren't enough budgetary gimmicks in the world to change that fact. And for what? Why are Republicans doing this? So that billionaires can pay less in taxes while tens of millions lose their healthcare benefits and pay more for everyday expenses.
I yield to my colleague from Oregon for the first parliamentary inquiry.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, a parliamentary inquiry.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator will state his inquiry.
When the House bill was first laid before the Senate, was the operative baseline under which it would be considered the current law baseline under section 257 of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Yes.
The Democrat leader.
Mr. President, I rise for a parliamentary inquiry.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator will state his inquiry.
Has the Senate ever used a baseline other than the current law baseline under 257 for the enforcement of budget points of order, including under section 313 of the Budget Act, during the consideration of a reconciliation measure?
Has it ever been used?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. No.
The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, what the Republican majority is doing right now on the Senate floor is hiding trillions of dollars in handouts to corporations and the wealthy--trillions of dollars. If you measure this bill the way we measure every other reconciliation bill, it simply doesn't comply with the rules. The Republican majority has figured out a trick that allows them to sidestep the Parliamentarian, violate the Congressional Budget Act, and lift the filibuster for Trump's entire legislative agenda in one fell swoop. It is fakery. The budget numbers are a fraud, but the deficits will be very real. The prospect of a catastrophic death spiral is very real. The hardship this terrible bill is going to inflict on tens of millions of Americans will be very real.
So my parliamentary inquiry will proceed now: Does the score of the finance title of the Senate substitute, which the chairman asserts complies with its instruction, rely on the use of two distinct baselines: current policy for taxes and current law for health provisions like Medicaid?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Yes.
The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, a parliamentary inquiry.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator will state her inquiry.
Are the remaining nine titles of the Senate substitute scored by the CBO using a current law 257 baseline?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Yes
The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, I have been here a long time. Not only have I been the Budget chair but I am the longest serving Democrat on that committee, and in my 33 years here in the
Forget Senate procedure for a minute. Math has never worked that way. I taught preschool, and I will tell you, even our littlest kids know the difference between a trillion and zero. It doesn't take a preschooler to tell you they are using magic math or that you can't just ignore the rules you don't like.
How many times have my colleagues cried about the debt? How many times have they told me: I know you want to invest in childcare, Patty, but we have got to get this budget under control?
But now that it is tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, suddenly, the budget doesn't matter anymore. Suddenly, the rules do not matter anymore. Suddenly, a couple trillion goes away with a sprinkle of fairy dust, and bypassing the Parliamentarian and precedent isn't really bypassing if you just close your eyes and just pretend real hard.
Have you no shame? If you think you can look the American people in the face and tell them we have to bring down the debt after passing what might be the most expensive bill in history--if you think you can do that and then be taken seriously, well, do you know what? If you believe that, maybe you are foolish enough to think that zero and a trillion are the same.
I can't believe this is what we are doing today, because I can tell you right now, if this happens, we will all laugh you out of the room because we have never seen anything like this, not in my time here in the Senate, not in my time on this planet. We are not going to let anyone forget that you are trashing the rules in order to pass this egregious bill.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, I want to share a couple comments with my colleagues, my Republican colleagues, because I have made these remarks on the floor. Generally, the floor is empty, but you are here now.
In 1974, 100 Senators agreed on reconciliation as a fast track, filibuster-free, but only for one purpose: reducing the deficit. It had three pillars: first, reduce the deficit over a 10-year period; second, reduce the deficit in each and every year after that 10-year period in each title of the bill; and, third, use honest numbers.
In 1996, the Republican team was in the majority and decided on a nuclear option to allow that reconciliation process to be used to increase deficits in the 10-year window. That was unfortunate because it destroyed the agreement all 100 Senators had agreed to in 1974.
But now, today, if we proceed with this current policy baseline, there are two other pillars that you are destroying of the architecture to create fiscal discipline. The second pillar was no deficits after the 10-year period. That has been destroyed. The third was to use honest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office on a current law basis comparing each provision in the bill as compared to the provision not being in the bill.
So here we are, taking a step that is as significant as it was in 1996. All three pillars will be brought down not by Democrats but by Republicans. It is not necessary to do this to get what you want within the 10-year period. Why tear down these additional two pillars of honesty about the numbers--of no more smoke and mirrors--and creating deficits after the 10-year period? It is extremely unfortunate if you press forward with that vision in this bill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, I want to pick up on the point that my colleague from Washington State touched on.
Everybody ought to understand that this is the nuclear option. It is just hidden behind a whole lot of Washington, DC, lingo. The only difference is, instead of pressing a big nuclear button right at the beginning of the Congress, Republicans decided that they would hide behind the cloak of Senate procedure and go nuclear for every individual bill they want to pass on party lines.
I just say to my colleagues: There is going to be a lot of horrendous messes to clean up after this legislation.
But my colleagues need to understand that the move, as my colleague from Washington State has said, cuts both ways.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democrat leader.
Mr. President, I ask that debate time come off the bill unless otherwise advised.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
I yield to the Senator from Rhode Island.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, in this place where big money now rules and in which fakery is now the order of the day and numbers no longer have to be real, there is one point that stands out, and that is that the fakery on the floor is belied by the language of the bill. If these assertions were true, they would not need to raise the debt limit.
All of these fun and games, all of this parliamentary mischief that is happening right now crashes into the fact that, in real markets, in the real world outside of this fakery, the debt limit is actually a real thing.
I will take a moment to read from page 754 of this midnight monstrosity, what it actually says, where it collides with the real world.
Line 20:
Five trillion dollars--that is the real number here. That is where the rubber hits the road in real life.
The maneuver that is being pulled right now to avoid that fact--the fact that the debt limit has to be increased by $5 trillion so the Republicans can give immense tax breaks to billionaires--has not been used for this before.
I used it once. In the year 2000, a deal had been struck on how to score activities of the Power Marketing Administration. Does anybody really know about the Power Marketing Administration? It is a small thing.
Over the years, the Congressional Budget Office started scoring the program differently than the Senate had agreed to in 2000. So in 2023 and 2024, the Senate Budget chair--me--and the House Budget chair, Jodey Arrington, on a bipartisan basis invoked this section to have CBO return to the original Senate agreement and not the variation that they had created.
This is what section 312 has been used for--to resolve technical ambiguity to advance a bipartisan appropriations deal, not to create Senate floor fakery, belied by the $5 trillion debt limit hike that Republicans are obliged to pass to make good on this huge billionaire blowout we are forcing through the Senate floor now.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. President, I am using and yielding time off the bill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, the debate and eventual voting on the Big Beautiful Bill has begun. Hallelujah. It has taken a while for us to get here, but we are going to have a debate worthy of a great country. We will have what they think and what we think, and we are going to vote on this bill in the coming days. I am excited about that. I have worked a long time with my colleagues to get to where we are today.
So, to the American people, the debate is beginning right now regarding the Big Beautiful Bill. I will tell you why that is good news for you, but let me take a little bit of time to talk about current policy versus current law.
I know everybody is on the edge of their seat at home, but here is what I would tell you about numbers and Budget chairmen. I am not the first Budget chairmen. There have been those who came before me. In 2008,
Judd Gregg--a really smart guy, a former Budget chairman--said:
That is what I am doing. I am setting the numbers. The Parliamentarian said that is my job as Budget chairman.
The resolution we are operating under to get us here--we voted to make that the case. So we are not doing anything sneaky. We actually voted to give me the authority to do this, and it passed.
Again, I am not the first chairman to change a baseline for different reasons--one, to get the farm bill in, and on another occasion, Senator Sanders changed the baseline in 2022, when he was Budget chairman, under budget reconciliation to issue a budget rule allowing the numbers to change to get more money for Head Start. So Senator Sanders, as Budget chairman, directed that a new rule be written to get more money for Head Start.
So don't tell me you have never done this before in terms of changing the baseline as Budget chairman.
The Budget chairman, under 312, sets the baseline. This has been acknowledged by Republicans and Democrats. The baseline has been changed in the past based on the Budget Committee chairman's desire, one, to get a farm bill in, and the other, to change the numbers--a new rule--to get Head Start spending. So this has been done before.
But I will be the first to say that what we are doing here is historic in a good way.
In 2017, we passed the Trump tax cuts. They are due to expire in December. Why is that? Before I got here, current law was the way to score or implement tax policy. After 10 years, the tax cuts expired-- current law.
As Budget chairman, I have decided to use current policy when it comes to cutting taxes. If you use current policy, they never expire. So the policies that were created in 2017 would not end in December; they would continue. That is a good thing for the American people, and that is a good thing for the economy because it gives you certainty.
So I made a decision as Budget chairman, working with my colleagues, to look at tax cuts as something important for the country, to give certainty to businesses and individuals, and make sure that after 10 years, they don't arbitrarily go away and have a cliff. I made that decision, my colleagues backed me up, and that is in the budget resolution governing the debate we are here for today.
So why do we want to make the tax cuts permanent? Because if they expire in December, the average family of four in South Carolina will have a $1,700 increase. I don't want that, and I bet you people at home don't want that. So we have to deal with that. That cliff is coming, and not only do I want to avoid that cliff, I don't want to put us in that position ever again.
The tax cuts have generated more revenue for the government than CBO estimated in 2017.
The one thing about our friends at CBO--I appreciate all your hard work; you have worked really hard--when it comes to taxing, they always get it wrong about how much revenue is to be collected.
When you look at the years that have passed since 2017, on the corporate side and on the individual side, the revenue to the government has actually grown because of those tax cuts, and that is a good thing. So cutting taxes means more money for you and your family.
Our friends on the other side, if you are waiting on them to cut your taxes, you are going to die waiting. They are never going to do it. Why are we doing it? Because they won't do it. We could never get 60 votes for this.
The bottom line is, we are going to make these tax cuts permanent. That is a good thing for businesses. Expensing will be allowed, so you can invest in growing your business. You can buy new equipment. You can write it off sooner. That will get more activity in the economy. It is not me saying that; there is a track record.
Mr. President, you have been in business. This stuff works. They don't like it, but it works. If you are in business, and the Tax Code encourages you to invest in your business, you will.
This stuff literally works, and they hate it because it is money that could have gone to the government but went back into the economy. What they don't realize is, actually, the government gets more money. They just keep spending it. We could do better on the spending side, and we are going to do better on the spending side.
So this bill makes the 2017 tax cuts permanent. It avoids a tax increase for your family that is coming in December if we don't act now.
It secures the border. One of the reasons there are more of us than our Democratic friends is how you screwed the country up for the last 4 years. We went from secure borders to completely open borders, absolute chaos. That is why we are winning, and you are losing.
You want to take us back to open borders. We are not going. We are not going back to your policies that allowed 8.3 million encounters at the border, 1.7 million ``got-aways,'' and chaos in cities and communities.
We are not going back to the policies that led to Laken Riley's murder in Georgia, where the man convicted of murdering her was captured several times, released because there was no detention space to hold him in Texas and he left--a free man--went to Georgia, and killed this lady. That has happened too many times, and it is going to stop.
Now, what are we doing to secure the border? We went from lawless borders to the most secure borders in 6 months because of President Trump.
President Trump, you should be exceedingly proud--Homan, the whole team. You have locked that border down. But we want to do it in a way that it will stay locked down for the President after you and beyond.
So how do we secure the gains made by President Trump and his team? We are going to, in this bill, hire more ICE agents to expedite removal of people who shouldn't be here, particularly criminal elements, people who are dangerous. We are going to finish the wall. Not one Democrat-- maybe one--no way would we get 60 votes to hire more ICE agents. No way would we get Democratic help to finish the wall. We are going to go from 40,000 detention beds to 125,000. This securing the border is about $175 billion. New technology along the border and fiber cable so we don't go back to the days of open borders--this is in the bill.
To those of you who voted for us and President Trump to secure the border, we are delivering through this bill. And they would never do what we are doing. I will be the first to admit, when it comes to securing the border, they are never going to do what we are doing. We are hiring more ICE agents; we are finishing the wall; and we are increasing more detention beds so we don't let people out that can go and murder.
I am very proud of this. I wrote this part. This is money well spent. This will secure that border in perpetuity.
President Trump, this is your bill. It is in our bill. Well done.
To my friends on the other side, you had your chance, and you screwed it up big time. That is why we are in charge.
Revitalized our military. The world is a dangerous place. We have $150 billion in this bill to help build out the Golden Dome, to help improve the quality of life of the men and women serving the military by improving their barracks and housing. They need the money--more weapons--to send this bill, and we didn't have to get extorted to buy a bunch of butter to get $150 billion.
We reduced government spending over a decade by $1.6 trillion. We are running a deficit in our national debt of $37 trillion. So what have we done here?
In the last 5 years, from 2020, basically, to now, Medicaid has grown by 50 percent. So what has happened is that Medicaid was originally intended for children and poor families--children--and people who were disabled and couldn't work to provide healthcare.
Count me in for that. Makes lot of sense.
Along comes President Obama. He expands Medicaid to include able- bodied adults for the first time. And what he did was he incentivized States to include these people in Medicaid. For every new able-bodied adult, you get 90 percent of the cost from the Federal
So what are we going to do? We are going to try to deal with that in a responsible way.
What about this idea: If you are not a child, if you are not disabled--if you are able-bodied and you don't have any children under 14--we are going to have a 20-hour-a-week work requirement for you to stay on Medicaid.
That is a good thing. It is a good thing for the individual involved to be working. It is a good thing for the taxpayer for them to be working. But that seems to be a crime on the other side to ask somebody to work that can work.
How many people out there listening to this--I don't know how many there are--but are you working every day? Are you going to work with kids? A lot of people do that, by the way.
So one of the reforms in this bill is to introduce a work requirement to the additional population that President Obama put on Medicaid that was never intended under the original purpose of Medicaid. This work requirement is going to save a bunch of money.
Finally, we are addressing the biggest scam I have seen in a very long time. Somewhere along the line, somebody figured out at the State level, if you tax doctors and hospitals and medical providers on the funds they get and take that revenue, you can actually get more Medicaid money. This is a money laundering scheme. It needs to come to an end as we know it.
States have gone up to 6 percent of a provider tax. They take that tax revenue, and they use it to get more money from the Federal Government. The hospitals and doctors don't lose. They get the money back. The State doesn't lose. They get more money. The only group that loses is the Federal Government, and we are deep, deep in debt.
So we are going to reform the provider tax system that I think is abusive--very abusive.
As to Medicaid, it is on a growth trajectory that will overtake Medicare. Now is the time to put commonsense reform in place not only to slow the growth--and we are not talking about cutting Medicaid, we are slowing the growth--but try to create some sense of fiscal responsibility.
So to our chairman of the Finance Committee, you have constructed a package better than 2017. You have included some growth elements in the package that will allow the economy to grow because it will be in business's interest to invest, and I want to applaud you for this growth package.
Now what does this all mean? Current policy, current law.
If you do what I have decided to do, make the tax cuts permanent and you implement these reforms to Medicaid in other areas, you will, over the next 10 years, reduce the deficit by $507 billion. That is CBO, not me.
Now, how do you do that? You grow the economy, and you begin to control spending in a commonsense way. Most people can relate to that because they do it all the time. People at home sometimes have to work extra to meet the needs of their family, and they have to tighten their belt. So what have we achieved here in the One Big Beautiful Bill?
We are going make your border as secure as it possibly can be and never go back to open borders. We are going to put in place border security measures to keep it secure. We are going to make the tax cuts permanent so your taxes do not go up in December of this year, and we are going to add additional pro-growth policies to help our economy.
We are going to reform Medicaid in a way that makes sense, deal with the waste, fraud, and abuse of that program so that there is more money for the disabled and children because the more money you give the able- bodied who can work is less money for children and people on disability.
And one of the most perverse things about what President Obama did is that the reimbursement rates to States are higher for able-bodied adults than they are for disabled people and children--90 percent. So President Obama created a system to entice States--lure them in--to add people to Medicaid that are not disabled, not poor children, because his goal was to put everybody in the country under government-run healthcare. And the government reimbursement is higher for an able- bodied person than it is for a poor child or a disabled person.
We are going to stop that because that is not fair. It is not fair to the taxpayer. It is not fair to the population that we are trying to help.
So we are going to control spending in a commonsense way; we are going to revitalize our military at a time of great need; we are going to secure the border; and we are going to make the tax cuts that expire in December permanent so we don't have to deal with this every 10 years.
It is a big beautiful bill if you believe in cutting people's taxes, securing the border, having a strong military, and controlling government spending.
It is a nightmare--this bill--for those who want to raise taxes, who want open borders, who want a weak military, and never want to control one dime of Federal spending.
This bill is your nightmare if you are for open borders. This bill is your nightmare if you want the government to grow without any limitation. This bill is your nightmare if you want a weak military because it is going to give us a stronger military.
So why do we have this debate? That is what they--through years of effort--have done. The military is always the last thing that gets funded when they are in charge. When they are in charge, you have no border--completely broken, millions of people running through our country lawless.
When they are in charge, there is no limit to growing the government. They entice everybody to grow the government. And when they are in charge, they are never going to cut your taxes in any meaningful way.
The tax rates since 2017--the top rate has been 37. If these tax cuts expire, your taxes--if you are a family of four--will go up by $1,700, and we will go back to the 49.6 rate.
Here is a question for the country: How much should the Federal Government take of anybody's income? What is a fair share?
Thirty-seven percent seems pretty damn fair to me--over a third of what you make, and that doesn't count State and local taxes.
The number they would pick is probably 90.
So is 37 percent fair? I think yes. Most Americans think 25 percent is fair. You know, Jesus wants 10 percent. There is no number they won't embrace. So somewhere between 90 and 10--37 is fair.
This is not rewarding the wealthy; it is creating a number that makes sense. Thirty-seven percent going to the Federal Government is a fair share. It is over a third of what you make. That doesn't count State and local taxes.
This has been long. It is been hard, but we are about done. In a couple of days, we are going to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill. President Trump is going to sign it. Mike Crapo and his staff deserve at least one day off.
I cannot thank you enough for what you and your team have done. To my budgeteers, you have been terrific. You have worked really hard. To CBO and Joint Tax and all these people, hats off to your efforts to get us a quality product.
To all of my colleagues who have rode the boat with us, we are about to reach the shore. And when this boat comes ashore, every family in America can heave a sigh of relief. Your taxes will not go up this December. You will get a Christmas present of not having a tax increase.
To those who have been yearning for a secure border, it will be secure. To those men and women in the uniform, you are going to get some help. You desperately need it. To those who think we should do something about the government's growth in a commonsense way, we have achieved that.
I am very proud of this bill. I am very proud of President Trump. I am very proud of the Republican team that has gotten us to this point.
To my Democratic colleagues, we will work together where we can, but nobody over here ever expects you to do anything about the border because you have proven you can't. Nobody over here believes you are ever going to reduce the size of government because you don't want to.
The bottom line is, we are about to make history, Mr. President. This is your first term. I don't know what comes later for you. I hope you are
I doubt if you will ever do anything more important than this.
Senator Crapo, you have been here a while. You are one of the smartest guys I have ever met. Everything you have done in all your life has led to this moment. This is what you were built to do. This is what you were meant to do. You are the right man at the right time to do what this country desperately needs to stay on track to be safe and prosperous.
To all my colleagues who are going to vote for this bill, you should be proud, and you should talk about it because it is going to make us all safer, and it is going to make us all more prosperous.
My being Budget chairman is a quirk in the history of the Senate. This is not my thing normally, but I have really gotten into it. And I have learned a lot thanks to my colleagues, and I am proud to have the honor of being Budget chairman at a time I think it matters the most.
Mr. President, with that, I yield to my good friend.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the use of calculators, whatever they are, be permitted on the floor of the Senate during consideration of the bill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Idaho.
Mr. President, first of all, let me thank my colleague from South Carolina Senator Graham for his very kind words. I return the same kind of compliments to him for his great work in helping to build this bill and get us moved to this point.
I am going to make just a few remarks right now in response to some of the allegations and mischaracterizations that my colleagues on the other side have made about how this bill has been structured in terms of its evaluation and its scoring. And then, later, I will come and give a much longer speech--I am sorry, sir--on the bill itself.
Mr. President, the things that were said this morning just have to be responded to. First of all, it was said that the reason that we are going to increase the debt ceiling in the bill is because we are spending so much money and driving the deficit up.
Well, first of all, our bill drives the deficit down, not up; and, secondly, the reason we are dealing with the debt ceiling in the bill is because, under the previous administration's operations, the debt ceiling has already been breached. It was breached on January 2, and we are limping along with extraordinary measures--that is what we call them here in Washington--to try to keep the government funded until Congress can extend the debt ceiling.
This has nothing to do with President Trump. It happened before he even was sworn into office. It has nothing to do with this bill. It has to do with the profligate spending that drove us into a breach of the debt ceiling on January 2.
Secondly, my colleagues on the other side tried to characterize our choice of the current policy baseline as a gimmick and said it has never been done before.
Well, they should have been more careful in their words because the current policy baseline is currently utilized in the current CBO baseline for many spending programs. In fact, many spending programs-- about $2.5 trillion of spending programs--are measured under the current treatment which the Democrats have been using for decades to make it so they don't have to count spending increases as an increase in the deficit.
They are correct that that policy has never been applied to taxes before, because it was not intended to apply to taxes. That ruling and that system that was set up was intentionally designed to favor tax increases over spending cuts and to force Congress to increase taxes and increase spending. It was a strategy to achieve what we all know as tax and spend.
And no matter how they try to cover it over, today, in their debate, it comes down to this: They are furious that we refuse to raise taxes in America by $4.3 trillion on Americans; and they claim that our refusal to raise your taxes, America, is going to run up the deficit because they can't get $4 trillion more of your tax revenue into their pockets.
Well, the first failure of that rationale is, if you believe that you give them $4.5 trillion by letting them raise your taxes again, if you believe they are going to use that to pay the debt down, let me tell you, there is not a tax increase that I have seen in this Congress, in my lifetime, that was used to pay the debt down. It was used to increase spending. It is called tax and spend, and it is that bias in our scoring system that we are fixing today. We are fixing it so that current policy is how you treat taxes, just like you treat $2.5 trillion of spending this year in your scoring system. We are evening the balance board between taxing and spending, and America should breathe a sigh of relief that, finally, we are fixing our scoring procedures so that we don't have a built-in drive to increase taxes.
Let's put it another way. One of my colleagues said that even children can understand the difference between a trillion dollars and zero dollars. I think they can also understand that if you don't raise taxes, you are not changing the Tax Code; you are making it bring in the same revenue that it brought in before. You are not increasing the deficit; you are protecting their wallets.
The bottom line here is very simple. I think every American--at least 90 percent of them--intuitively understand that the refusal to let your taxes go up by $4 trillion is not a deficit increase. You are not responsible. Us keeping your money in your pocket is not making you responsible for increasing the deficit. Deficit increases come when Congress keeps spending your money and never ever controls its spending. The problem is not a lack of revenue; it is too much spending.
So let's make it clear. This is not a gimmick. The gimmick is the one that has been used for all these years. We are making a balance between the treatment of tax and spend so that those taxpayers in America have at least a fair chance against the rules of this Chamber.
Now, one other point that I think needs to be made here is there was a lot of talk on the other side--and then I will stop and bring in my longer speech later. One other point that needs to be made here is that it was suggested that this has never been done before, even on taxes. Well, there is a President named President Obama, who faced a similar situation like we face today. Only, then, he was President when a huge tax cut that President Bush had accomplished was expiring. And all of those tax cuts that President Bush had been able to achieve were going to go away, and everybody's taxes were going to go up. And President Obama said: No, I am not going to let that happen.
So he put a bill out on the floor to stop those tax increases from happening. And he was attacked, actually, for increasing the deficit by not letting taxes go up. And President Obama, through his OMB Deputy Director, said that keeping tax policy current should be scored under a current policy and that his act in letting those tax increases be kept in place should be scored as current policy, not as a tax increase.
So you have got one of your own Presidents from the Democratic Party saying that letting existing tax law stay in place and protecting against huge tax increases on the American people is the appropriate approach to take; that current policy--and those are their words--is the way we should treat tax policy.
So I say to everybody in America who has been hearing all the politics of fear about what we are doing here in running up the deficit: You need to remember that only in Washington, DC, is the refusal to raise your taxes an increase in the deficit. And we are not going to let that happen.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. If no one yields time, time will be charged equally to both sides.
The Senator from Michigan.
Mr. President, I rise today in opposition to the widely irresponsible legislation that is before us now. Although our colleagues are calling it the Big Beautiful Bill, this bill would instead be a betrayal to our economic future, hard-working American
This bill will blow up our national debt, kick millions of people off of their healthcare, and take food off of families' tables, while cutting food assistance.
And for what? What are our colleagues mortgaging our country's future for? What are they slashing healthcare and food assistance to pay for?
Well, they are doing it for tax cuts for billionaires.
So before my colleagues rush to pass this irresponsible, reckless legislation, let's take a moment to go through exactly how much harm this bill will actually cause and hear from the people in my State who will suffer if this bill becomes law.
To start, this bill will blow up the national debt. Since President George Washington gave his Farewell Address, our Nation's leaders have warned against the dangers of accumulating a national debt. Fifteen years ago, ADM Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated:
The national debt is at an alltime high--$36.2 trillion. And just in the last 16 years, it has tripled. Our annual deficits frequently exceed $1.5 trillion, including a record $3.1 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2020 during the Trump administration.
Unfortunately, these are the first of many grave financial milestones that we face. Within the next decade, our country will spend more on servicing the debt than we do on any other Federal account outside of Social Security.
Our fiscal house is basically on fire, but if our Republican colleagues jam through this bill, it is not going to pour water on that fire, it is going to pour gasoline on those flames.
Democrats have tried to make efforts to pay down that debt in recent years. In fact, under the Inflation Reduction Act--a law that this bill attempts to actually gut--we reduced the deficit in that bill by nearly $250 billion. In 2023, we passed the bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act, which responsibly addressed the debt ceiling and had the potential to reduce deficits by up to $1.5 trillion. But, unfortunately, the bill before us basically wipes all of that away.
I have always said that I am open to making smart cuts to spending, but those cuts should be matched with increases in revenue. Doing so would put us back on a sustainable financial path. Our Republican colleagues are doing the exact opposite. They are making drastic cuts to revenue, and according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax provisions in this bill alone would decrease revenues by $4.2 trillion and add--yes, add--$3 trillion to our national debt.
This is a recipe for disaster. If we face another emergency like a pandemic or global financial crisis, we will be too hamstrung by our debt to respond effectively.
We are on the brink of a financial disaster, and passing this bill could push us over that edge--all so my Republican colleagues can cut taxes for billionaires. At the same time, our Republican colleagues are not making smart, sensible spending cuts to cover the costs of those billionaire tax cuts. Instead, they are gutting healthcare for millions of Americans, including hundreds of thousands of Michiganders. It is reckless, and it is wrong.
Medicaid is a lifeline for people in every single community across this country. It ensures that millions of Michiganders and Americans can have access to quality, affordable healthcare.
Right now, folks across my home State of Michigan are scared--are scared about what this bill will mean for their families.
I have heard from thousands of my constituents from every corner of the State of Michigan on how these cuts are going to hurt them. So today, I just want to tell you, through my constituents' stories, just how detrimental this bill will be for most Americans.
Take Isaac from Lansing for example, who says Medicaid is the only lifeline he has to pay for the medicine that literally--literally-- keeps him alive.
We have also seen how more and more Michiganders and people all across our Nation have shouldered the burden of serving as a primary caregiver for an aging parent. It is the ultimate gift that we can give to the people who have raised us. But the cost of critical nursing home and assisted living care continues to rise. Medicaid has become an essential way for our aging seniors to pay for the care they need.
Take Gwen from Grand Rapids, who says that she wouldn't be able to pay for an assisted living facility for her grandmother without Medicaid.
Many of us know someone or maybe even love someone who lives with a disability. Thanks to Medicaid, people with disabilities can get the care that allows them to live healthy and independent lives. That is the case for Wanda from Westland, who takes medication for an eye condition. Without Medicaid, she would not be able to afford her medication, and she could actually go blind.
As too many of us know from personal experiences or from friends and loved ones, our country is facing a mental health crisis. Medicaid has become a saving grace for those who desperately need mental healthcare but simply cannot afford it.
Take Allen from Fort Gratiot, who says that losing Medicaid would feel like losing the life he has been given back through mental health care through Medicaid.
Under this bill, rural communities will be especially impacted by cuts to Medicaid. In some counties in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, there is only one healthcare provider, meaning some Michiganders will have to travel up to 50 miles to get routine or emergency care. Medicaid helps keep these hospitals open. If this bill passes, people in these rural communities are going to be cut off from basic health services.
Medicaid also plays an essential role in making sure that children across Michigan get the care they need. I heard from Gladys, a mother from Flint, who says that Medicaid is the only reason her kids can get their asthma medication or have regular health checkups. Expecting mothers also reached out to share their concerns. While she is busy preparing to welcome a newborn baby into the world, Chelsea from Fennville is now afraid that she will lose her access to both pre- and postnatal care under this absolutely disastrous bill.
I simply can't understand how my Republican colleagues would leave thousands--thousands--of people across Michigan without the care they need, all so they can give a tax break to billionaires.
On top of that, my Republican colleagues are also proposing deep, harmful cuts to food assistance delivered through SNAP. SNAP serves as an absolute lifeline for millions of Americans, including children, seniors, people with disabilities, and working families.
So, simply put, if this bill is passed, it will mean people in Michigan and all across our country will go hungry. They will not be able to put food on the table, while billionaires pay less taxes. That is just wrong. But it also makes no economic sense, either. Every dollar in SNAP benefits generates more than $1.50 in economic activities. This supports local grocery stores, farmers all across our country, and the entire food supply chain. So on top of jeopardizing families' ability to put food on the table, to feed their children, these proposed SNAP cuts would also hurt businesses and jobs, particularly in rural America and in low-income areas.
This bill produces the most amount of pain for the least amount of gain of any legislation I can remember in all the years I have had the privilege of serving here in the Senate. I can't believe that we are standing here debating this reckless, irresponsible bill. The harm this bill will do to the American people and to the people in my State of Michigan who are counting on Medicaid for healthcare and on food assistance to help feed their families is absolutely reprehensible. The damage this bill will do to our Nation's economic security is not only reckless, it is unconscionable.
This is not what our constituents want us to be focused on. They want us to help make their lives better. But instead of focusing on that, here we are on the brink of passing a bill so irresponsible that it will destroy our country's economic health, harm millions of Americans--all so a handful of billionaires, the wealthiest of the
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
MR. CRAPO. Mr. President, I am here to talk now about the centerpiece of this reconciliation bill: making the 2017 tax cuts permanent. The One Big Beautiful Bill prevents the largest tax hike in history and provides groundbreaking new tax relief for middle-class workers and families.
This legislation permanently extends the Trump tax cuts, which proportionately benefited the middle class the most. If these tax cuts were allowed to expire, taxpayers in all income groups would see massive tax hikes. A point that my colleagues on the other side seem to consistently forget or ignore is that the vast majority of them--$2.6 trillion worth of those tax increases--would fall on taxpayers making less than $400,000 per year, and the vast majority of that is on taxpayers making and earning in the middle and lower middle income categories.
But before I go on to discuss what would happen, I want to address an issue that is just a constant, constant theme on the other side, and that is that this bill is going to be a huge increase in the deficit.
Now, here is a quick, handwritten chart that my colleague from South Carolina made quickly to respond to that.
You heard the previous speaker say that CBO has scored this bill to have a huge, multitrillion-dollar deficit increase. The fact is that CBO has scored this bill to have a $507 billion deficit reduction--you heard that right: a $507 billion deficit reduction. Later on in my remarks, I will point out that that score doesn't even take into account the growth in the economy and the revenue that will come to our Treasury from revitalizing and giving a boost to our economy.
So now let's go to the next chart. What will happen if we don't do this? What will happen if we do what the Democrats are demanding that we do, and that is to let this tax increase happen so that they can say they are going to use it to pay the deficit down? The average family of four would see a tax hike of $1,700, and their child tax credit would be cut in half. Twenty million small business owners would face massive tax hikes, with some of them facing rates as high as 43 percent. The standard deduction, which simplifies tax filing for 90 percent of Americans, would be cut in half. Small businesses and farms would see their debt exemption cut in half.
The Council of Economic Advisers warns us that this $4 trillion tax hike would also lead to an economic downturn and potential recessionary headwinds, noting that the impacts would disproportionately fall on young people, minorities, and workers without college degrees.
We have been working for more than a year on legislation that prevents that outcome and provides an opportunity for us to have additional tax relief--additional tax relief that is specifically targeted to benefit low- and middle-income families and workers.
Despite the rhetoric of fear, the rhetoric about tax cuts being for billionaires and corporations, the reality is that this legislation prevents a massive tax hike across the board and overwhelmingly benefits middle-class households and job creators.
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, this bill provides more than $600 billion--that is $600 billion more--of new tax relief for hard-working Americans. How does it do that? There is $73 billion in inflation tax relief targeted at income brackets below $100,000 per year; $205 billion in tax relief to the 90 percent of taxpayers who claim the standard deduction; $93 billion in additional tax relief for seniors through a $6,000 bonus exemption; $124 billion in investment in children of low- and middle-income families, in addition to the permanent, doubled child tax credits. I am going to say that again: the permanent, doubled child tax credit.
The significant tax relief we are providing to hard-working families includes: permanent lower tax rates, letting Americans keep more of their hard-earned money; permanent increased and enhanced standard deduction, claimed by over 90 percent of taxpayers.
On top of making that doubled child tax credit permanent, we are also increasing it for tens of millions of families.
There is tax relief for seniors in the form of a $6,000 bonus exemption for low- and middle-income seniors, slashing their tax burden; no tax on tips for millions of tipped workers, like waitresses, barbers, hairstylists, and taxi drivers; no tax on overtime for millions of America's hourly workers who work overtime and keep America running; no tax on auto loan interest for new cars made in the United States, allowing the hard-working families of America to fully deduct auto loan interest on American-made cars; enhanced 529 education savings accounts, making education expenses more affordable and accessible for families; new Trump savings accounts for newborns and children set up, up to the age of 18, building financial security for the next generation.
We make childcare more accessible and affordable for working families by enhancing the child and dependent care credit and the dependent care assistance program.
The list goes on and on.
We extend the paid family and medical leave credit and expand health savings accounts for healthcare expenses.
We repeal onerous IRS reporting requirements on gig workers, reduce the paperwork burden for small businesses, and much more.
And all of this is just on the individual side of the code.
The business side of the Tax Code has the potential to generate phenomenal economic growth. When my Republican colleagues and I began talking about how to best extend and enhance the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, we agreed that one of our top priorities was to make it permanent--the reforms we made in 2017--including lower rates for corporations and small business owners, along with the international tax reforms, increased domestic investment, boosted economic growth, and increased take-home pay.
A growing economy powered a strong labor market. Workers saw record wage growth, and the unemployment rate fell dramatically to the lowest in 50 years, at 3.5 percent.
Corporate inversions, which we used to debate and debate endlessly-- or businesses leaving America--became a thing of the past. They literally ended, and America became the place to do business again. Capital formation exploded in the United States.
Restoring these critical business provisions and making them permanent is a key to driving additional growth and investment in the United States.
For businesses that spur investment and economic activity across the country, this bill makes the 20 percent small business deduction permanent, enabling job creation and spurring local economic activity.
It restores and makes permanent full expensing for domestic research and development, encouraging domestic innovation; restores and makes permanent full expensing for new capital investments, like machinery and equipment, boosting domestic production; restores and makes permanent interest deductibility, helping to finance critical domestic investments and keeping America globally competitive.
It includes full expensing for new factories and factory improvements to accelerate domestic manufacturing; permanently renews and enhances the Opportunity Zone Program, driving a hundred-plus billion dollars of investment to rural and distressed communities.
According to the Tax Foundation, ``permanence for the [bill's] four cost recovery provisions,'' which I have just reviewed, ``would more than double the long-run economic effect.''
The National Association of Manufacturers predicts that $248 billion in economic growth will come from the manufacturing sector alone, along with over 1 million jobs and over $100 billion in new wages.
The National Federation of Independent Business says that making the small-business deduction permanent will create 1.2 million jobs over 10 years, growing to 2.4 million jobs in the long run. That growth also means more Federal revenue created right along the way.
And the Council of Economic Advisers estimates that the tax legislation alone--this tax legislation alone--will drive more than $2 trillion in offsetting
And this chart is important to look at. This is what happens to our deficit if we pass this tax legislation and grow our economy.
And this is what happens if we don't. The red line is what happens if we don't.
Over a 10-year window, with this legislation in effect, as this chart shows, the estimate is 94 percent compared to 117 percent if the Trump tax cuts expire.
So while my colleagues on the other side complain and complain that we will not let taxes go up, this is what will happen if they do go up.
Far from adding to the deficit, this legislation will finally put us on a sound financial footing as we power growth and curb spending.
For those who claim that this bill will add over 4 trillion to the deficit, it bears repeating: Preventing a $4 trillion tax hike is not the same as deficit spending.
And for those who say that we should let a $4 trillion tax hike go into effect to pay down the national debt, every tax increase that Congress has adopted, for as long as I can remember, was not used to pay down the national debt. It was used to increase spending, and that is exactly what is going to happen if the Democrats have their way and force this tax hike to happen. It was used by Congress to spend more money, not to reduce debt.
Extending current tax policy means that tax revenue as a percent of GDP will remain relatively unchanged. We do not have a revenue problem in America. We have a spending problem. That is why we asked JCT to score this legislation under a more realistic scenario, using a current policy baseline.
The Council of Economic Advisers estimates that making the Trump tax cuts permanent, combined with other Trump administration pro-growth policies like regulatory reform and so forth, will increase Federal revenues by more than $4 trillion, far more than offsetting any deficit estimates.
When combined with the $1.6 trillion in spending reductions, this bill represents historic savings for taxpayers, far exceeding the spending reductions in the past by hundreds of billions of dollars.
And I want to look at this chart. I have talked a lot about tax cuts and protecting against tax increases, and the economic growth that happens from that. But reducing spending is another critical priority that we must address, and in addition to the pro-growth tax policy that I have just described, we cut spending by $1.6 trillion.
This chart shows how other bills have tried to take a shot at reducing spending in the past. We far exceed any spending reduction bill that Congress has ever passed. We are paying attention to the revenue side, and we are paying attention to the spending side.
To achieve this record level of savings, we are slashing President Biden's Green New Deal spending and promoting an ``America First'' energy policy. We are eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars of the Green New Deal subsidies, including ending wasteful credits like the EV tax credit. We stop penalizing fossil fuels in favor of unreliable and expensive green energy, and instead support consistent energy sources, making energy affordable again.
We are also rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in Federal spending programs, as my colleague from South Carolina mentioned, like those that we have identified in Medicaid. This will not reduce benefits for those who are qualified and for whom Medicaid was intended. It will reduce waste, fraud, and abusive scams that are being used to get the American taxpayer to funnel money into States or into other programs.
This program was created to help pregnant women, children, and seniors in America and those with disabilities. We are continuing to protect them. They will not lose benefits. And the politics of fear that you hear constantly are simply false.
But in recent years, the Democrats have incentivized Medicaid to enroll healthy Americans and illegal immigrants, driving up costs for taxpayers and risking the program's sustainability for those who need it the most.
This is what has happened. This is what is happening to the enrollment and the spending in Medicaid.
The fate of this expansion is an unsustainable path and puts the future of the program at risk, including the U.S. Federal debt.
As spending has surged, so have inappropriate payments and ineligible enrollments, along with gimmicks and loopholes.
People are alarmed by these statistics, but official reports indicate that the Federal Government made $543 billion in inappropriate Medicaid payments from 2015 through 2024. Some experts think that that number is closer to $1 trillion.
That is what we are addressing in this legislation. We have the responsibility to ensure that programs like Medicaid work efficiently and effectively and remain financially viable for those whom it was designed to help.
For months, my Democrat colleagues have engaged in the politics of fear, warning that Republicans are going to rip this critical program from those most in need. Let me be clear: This legislation does not take Medicaid away from any recipients whom the program was designed to help. Children, the elderly, the disabled or infirm, adults caring for children, and elderly relatives are protected by this bill. We would not be honoring our obligation to these recipients if we allow the program to continue to balloon, forcing vulnerable populations to compete for available resources with able-bodied adults who refuse to work.
One father recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
CBO estimates that over 1.4 million illegal aliens are receiving Medicaid benefits. I am talking about those who are not U.S. citizens and are not legally in the United States, receiving Medicaid benefits and pushing those like this man's 17-year-old son out of his opportunity to get access to those benefits.
Brett Guthrie, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, correctly notes:
Republicans are committed to preserving and strengthening Medicaid for the people Medicaid was intended to serve. That starts with making commonsense reforms to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the program.
This bill targets rampant fraud in the program by removing illegal aliens, deceased recipients, or those enrolled in multiple States. It eliminates wasteful spending by ensuring that Medicaid payments align with levels in Medicare and other spending programs and increases the frequency of eligibility checks. It requires more personal accountability and promotes pathways to work for able-bodied adults.
The work requirements proposed in this legislation are simple. Many people are amazed that they are so easy to meet and yet so rigorously opposed. If you are an able-bodied adult without dependents, you can qualify for taxpayer-funded Medicaid by spending 20 hours per week working or participating in work training or going to school or participating in community service or volunteer work.
The majority of Americans agree that these rules are responsible guardrails to protect a program that was designed to protect America's most vulnerable Americans.
The bill also corrects abusive practices by freezing and reducing provider taxes, a financial gimmick used by States to increase Federal spending that they receive.
For those concerned about funding for rural hospitals, during the transition back to responsible funding levels, the legislation creates a bridge funding system to help stabilize rural hospitals and enhance that long-term financial solvency.
And while Democrats claim Republicans are slashing Medicaid spending, the reality is that even with these reforms, Medicaid spending is projected to continue to grow by billions of dollars over the next 10 years. Only in Washington is a smaller increase in spending considered a cut. In reality, these reforms will improve, protect, and preserve Medicaid for the most vulnerable Americans.
We have had a very robust debate over how to best deliver on President Trump's agenda, and I am proud of what we achieved in this legislation. The tax provisions in our bill--from the permanent extension of the lower tax rate to the increased child tax credit, to the permanent tax relief for businesses--will deliver financial security for American families and grow our economy. The healthcare provisions will protect and preserve Medicaid for the Americans that the program was designed to serve.
And while more work remains, this bill's economic growth, combined with deficit reduction that we have in it, finally puts our country on a much better fiscal trajectory.
Speaking of work, I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to thank the excellent staff from the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Senate legislative counsel for the hard work and countless hours they have put in to get us to this point. Some of them have been working with us on these provisions for years, and we greatly appreciate your partnership in this effort.
I ask unanimous consent to have these individuals' names printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
I also have to thank my incredible staff who have foregone sleep over the past several months to provide timely, indispensable insight, facts, legislative text, counsel, and so much more. Without them, we would not be at this point and ready to deliver this much needed growth-focused policy for the American people.
I ask unanimous consent to have the names of my entire Finance Committee staff printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Mr. President, even with all that and all that we accomplish in this legislation, there are dozens of additional good ideas, smart policies, and commonsense reforms that we were not able to include today. I commit to working with my colleagues to advance those goals as well as we move forward. But today's historic legislation is more than a good start and will pay dividends for American families.
Extending good tax policy, delivering targeted relief, and reining in wasteful spending, as achieved in this bill, is the best way to restore economic prosperity and opportunity for all Americans. I look forward to getting it to the President's desk as soon as possible.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic whip.
Mr. President, we are here today debating a clumsily assembled package--still a work in progress--that would rip away healthcare from 16 million American families, give tax breaks to millionaires, billionaires, and the largest corporations.
Think about that for a moment.
Republicans have decided that the best avenue to generate revenue that they can then give in tax breaks to wealthy people is to eliminate health insurance coverage for 16 million Americans. That is going to have a dramatic impact on their lives. If you have ever been a young father with a baby with a serious medical problem, and you had no health insurance, you will never forget it as long as you live. I know; I have been there.
The notion of losing your health insurance leaves you as vulnerable as possible in some of the most important moments of your life. The day we consider this provision to eliminate health insurance coverage for 16 million families is unimaginable and cruel.
Let's not act like there is a unified Republican front on this issue. Even some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want to be here at this moment, jamming this unpopular bill through this Chamber under arbitrary deadlines.
One of my colleagues took a look at tax breaks. You will hear them say over and over again: If we don't act, the average family has to pay more in taxes. There is a way around that. If we limit any tax breaks in this bill in this effort to people making $400,000 a year or less-- $400,000 a year or less--it virtually eliminates two-thirds of the cost of this undertaking, and it means you don't have to take away the health insurance of 16 million families. So there are ways to do tax breaks which make sense.
Count this Democrat in with the Republicans for helping working families who are struggling to get by, and a lot of them are living paycheck to paycheck. The notion that we would say to them: We are going to take away your health insurance; we are going to raise the cost of health insurance for you, that is no answer to their problems.
Behind closed doors, my Republican colleagues continue to be consumed with infighting, bickering over the bill's substance, and for good reason.
We have a process here which is almost impossible to explain to an ordinary person of how we reach reconciliation. The Parliamentarian's office--she is sitting here--and God bless you for what you have been through the last several months and all your staff--have to make decisions on a daily basis, over and over again, as to whether or not provisions in this bill are eligible under the law that governs the U.S. Senate.
We are in the process of debating this on the Senate floor. I see our ranking member on the Budget Committee--the Senate Budget Committee-- the Senator from Oregon. We are in the process of still appealing to the Parliamentarian's office on provisions in the bill. This is truly a work in progress.
I think what they do know is troubling, and it should be. This bill would be a disaster for hospitals. The Senate Republican bill, unfortunately, is going to endanger hospitals all over the United States. But if you happen to live in a small town, rural area--and I
What is the impact of a hospital closing its door in a downstate community in Illinois? Devastating. Hospitals are not only the center for emergency medical care, good doctors, nurses, and such, they are also a major economic force in smalltown America. Take away a hospital and then try to attract a new business to your community--good luck.
This Senate bill cripples one of the main ways the States fund their Medicaid Programs and keep hospitals afloat, especially rural and low- income areas. It is called the provider tax. Earlier this week, a Republican Senator--a Republican Senator--circulated a flyer to his fellow caucus Members so they are all on notice detailing just how much each State will lose in Medicaid provider tax funding under the proposal.
Let's take a look at my neck of the woods, the Midwest. Iowa would lose $4.1 billion; Missouri, $6.1 billion; Kentucky, $12 million; Louisiana would lose $20 billion; North Carolina, $38.9 billion.
Senator Tillis and I were in a conversation yesterday, and he used that very same figure. His analysis says if we go forward with this bill, it cuts Medicaid reimbursement in his home State of North Carolina by a whopping $38.9 billion.
This list of States and what they will lose was passed around by a Republican Senator to his own caucus. They know what they are up against here. If Republicans have their way and pass this bill, hospitals will be forced to shrink or eliminate services. In Decatur, IL, one of the hospitals facing a crunch time had to make a decision whether to keep their doors open. They did, but they eliminated OB-GYN delivering babies and all mental health and addiction counseling--two critical areas for the hospitals.
So this bill will force hospitals to shrink or eliminate services. Doctors and nurses will leave and, in some cases, the hospital will close. Imagine in a rural area or remote area, an extra 45 minutes, an extra hour in the car with somebody in the front seat you love very much who is in a desperate situation. As it stands today, half of the rural hospitals around the country already operate in the danger zone, and it is the same thing for children's hospitals. If you have one in your community you use--I do. These children's hospitals have warned us they can't keep their doors open if Medicaid is cut as dramatically as the Republicans want to cut it.
If Republicans have their way, we are going to see massive layoffs, fewer nurses, technicians, and doctors, along with decreasing quality of care.
The American Hospital Association has estimated how these cuts to Medicaid could impact not just jobs in red State hospitals but across the entire economy. Here is what they found. If the Republican provision goes through that cuts Medicaid reimbursement in order to provide tax breaks for wealthy people--Maine is an example of one State. They would lose 5,000 jobs; Kansas, 6,200 jobs; Iowa, 11,000 jobs; Missouri, 26,600 jobs. I have talked to the administrator of BJC in St. Louis, MO. The reason is, it is not just a Missouri hospital. They have facilities on the Illinois side of the river. In fact, one- third of their patients are from Illinois, and one-third of their patients, overall, use Medicaid to run their hospital. He has told me what is going to happen if the Republican measure goes through and cutbacks to these hospitals.
They came up with, incidentally, the rescue fund to solve the political problem. I want to check and make sure Senator Murray can back me up on this. Our overall cut in Medicaid now is about $1 trillion?
One trillion dollars, imagine. This is Washington we are talking: cutting Medicaid nationwide $1 trillion and the rescue plan for the small hospitals that are in danger--the ones that I talked about--$1 trillion cut. How big is the rescue plan? It is $25 billion. Do the math. It is a joke. It is a joke.
If Republican leaders think this is an adequate amount to alleviate pain, all of our Nation, through our hospitals, are going to feel like that is trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose. This simply won't work.
I want to conclude by saying this. We passed the Affordable Care Act 15 years ago. Of all the things that I worked on in Congress, I think it had more positive impact to help the families across America than anything. We found a way to make health insurance more affordable for families 15 years ago. And to do it, we held hearings, 100 hearings on the Affordable Care Act--ObamaCare is what they called it--roundtables, walk-throughs. Two committees spent a combined 21 days holding markups so everyone could offer an amendment.
Do you know how many amendments were made to the ObamaCare program? Four hundred. There were 400 votes in committee and on the floor on amendments. One hundred forty-seven Republican amendments were included, though not a single Republican Senator ended up supporting ObamaCare when it was all over.
What do we have here with this measure, at the end of the day? That legislation, ObamaCare, allowed more than 40 million Americans to gain health insurance. Today, how many hearings have we had on the bill that is before us, this dramatic multitrillion-dollar bill? None. Zero. Not a single one. There are zero markups for Senators offering amendments. There were 400 amendments on ObamaCare--none on this one until it has come to the floor today with zero bipartisan input.
Our friends on the Republican side have said, basically, it is a big deal. Take it or leave it.
Should this bill become law, do you know what we will have done? Thrown 16 million Americans off health insurance and closed many vulnerable small hospitals--all to pay for tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. Maybe some of my Republican friends are OK with that. I don't think the American people are.
I am hoping that sanity and commonsense prevail. We need four. We need four Senators to step up and say: Stop this train. We have got to sit down and do our homework. We cannot expose the American families and the American economy and do this in the name of preserving tax breaks for the wealthiest people. Elon Musk seems to be doing OK in life, right? He is the wealthiest man in the world. Do you know what the tax break will be for Elon Musk on the bill that is before us on the floor? It will be $346,000--a lot of money. To him, he won't even notice it. They are giving him a tax break he won't notice and taking away health insurance from families who will be devastated--16 million around the country. It is an important choice, and we should make the right one.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. President, in deciding whether to vote for the ``Big, Not So Beautiful Bill,'' I have asked a very specific question: Will the deficit be more or less next year? The answer, without question, is: This bill will grow the deficit. The Federal Government has fancy formulas and hundreds of wonky accountants who inform us of their projections over 10 years, but you often can't trust these projections.
In an excellent piece written by the Foundation for Economic Education, entitled ``The CBO's Projections Are Worse Than Useless,'' Eric Schuler writes:
Sometimes the predictions are off because a new Congress is elected and changes the law. Eric Schuler writes that, for any projection of a 10-year budget to be accurate, the Congressional Budget Office ``has to assume the law won't change for ten years, even as most of the politicians that make the laws risk being replaced [every] two years-- and all of them advocate for changes of one stripe or another . . .''
Schuler states what few in Washington will admit:
Sometimes these predictions are off by $1 trillion or so because the economy grew more slowly or more quickly than anticipated.
Bruce Thompson, a former Senate aide and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury writes that the Congressional Budget Office ``miscalculated the deficit [last year] by $1 trillion.''
So in deciding whether to vote for any big, monstrous bill, it helps to ask the right question. To me, the most pertinent question is, How will the bill affect the deficit in the next year?
Currently, our deficit is estimated to be a little under $2 trillion this year. What will happen to the debt in 2026 if this bill passes?
Well, in using the math most favorable to the supporters of the bill, referred to as a policy baseline, the deficit in 2026 will still be $270 billion more than this year. So even using the math, even using the formulas that the supporters of the bill like, the deficit will grow by $270 billion next year. That is just not good if you profess to be fiscally conservative.
Why will the deficit grow next year? Well, even if you argue that the 2017 tax cuts don't need to be counted in the calculation at all, the new tax cuts add up to $234 billion to the debt next year.
In addition, the ``Big, Not So Beautiful Bill'' adds new spending of over $500 billion--military, border, agricultural subsidies, et cetera. That spending is front-loaded and will be spent in the first 4 years of the 10-year window.
Legislative spending is one of the few items in the bill that is exact. It isn't estimated. If they say they will spend $500 billion, they are going to spend $500 billion in all of the first few years. So, in order not to add to the deficit, the ``BBB,'' the ``Big, Not So Beautiful Bill,'' has to have corresponding spending cuts to counter all the new spending. Unfortunately, the spending cuts are back-loaded to the final 5 years of the 10-year window when several tax cuts expire and the spending increases are finished.
In addition, elections occur every 2 years and could easily wipe out any perceived savings that might occur in the later years.
The only real certainty in this budget drama are the budget years coming in the immediate future. It is the next year or two that are the only things that are actually of any certainty. So, if we analyze this bill from that perspective, we discover that the bill increases the debt by $500 billion in the first 5 years. This is not the CBO's projection that Republicans have not liked. This is the projection they are using that says the debt will add $500 billion in the first 5 years. They say, somehow, miraculously, in the last 5 years, it gets to $500 billion in savings. So it is a $1 trillion shift from year 5 to year 10. The CBO scores it differently, not as encouragingly, and says it adds over $3 trillion in debt.
So which is it? Does this bill save $500 billion over 10, or does it add $3 trillion over 10?
The truth is, even for a person with a magic crystal ball, it is anybody's guess, which brings us back to, maybe we have to judge the effects of the ``Big, Not So Beautiful Bill'' by looking at what happens to the debt next year.
Supporters of the bill admit it adds $270 billion to the debt next year. That is the only thing we know for certain. We don't know what will happen in year 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, or 10; but we know that next year, this bill will grow the deficit by $270 billion.
In addition, the bill increases the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. What does that mean? That is an admission that they know they aren't controlling the deficit; that they know the ensuing years will add trillions more. So we are adding $2 trillion this year, but they are anticipating--the authors of the bill are anticipating--adding more than $2 trillion next year.
That doesn't sound at all conservative to me, and that is why I am a no.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, joining me on the floor are experts in the budget process, who are former chairs and ranking members: Senator Murray, who was the Senate Budget chair from 2013 through 2015; Senator Whitehouse, who was the Senate Budget chair from 2023 through 2025; and Senator Van Hollen, who was the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee from 2011 through 2017.
We are here to address a fundamental violation of the law--of section 313--the Senate rules for reconciliation.
To try to summarize this in the simplest words possible, 100 Senators voted to have a special fast-track, filibuster-free pathway solely for reducing the debt. The first principle was that no deficits could be created in a 10-year period. Our Republican colleagues blew that up in 1996 when they wanted to do a tax bill that would create massive deficits. Then a second pillar was no deficits in any title of the bill in any year after the first 10 years. This bill, right now, if this passes, blows that up. The third was to use honest numbers, Congressional Budget Office numbers.
I have a letter here from the Congressional Budget Office, and they say that the estimate is relative to the CBO's January 2025 baseline. The CBO is required to construct its baseline under the assumption specified in the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act.
In response to your questions about the cost of title VII, the question was, Would title VII increase the deficit by more than the $1.5 trillion over the 2025 through 2034 period? The answer is, yes, the CBO estimates that its enacting would increase the deficit by nearly $3.5 trillion over the 2025-2034 period--$3.5 trillion.
We then asked, Would it increase deficits in the years beyond 2034, beyond the 10-year window? The answer was yes.
But if you were to ask my Republican friends, they would say: No, no, no. We are inventing a new theory, and that is that anything that the 2017 tax giveaway to the billionaires put into law that expired after 10 years, we are just going to assume it would have continued, and, therefore, our continuing it doesn't cost anything.
That is a pretty crazy notion that if they didn't put it into the bill, the law says it ends, but they say: No, no. It would have continued anyway through some magical way; so, therefore, a tax break for the really wealthy costs nothing.
This is exactly--exactly--the type of lying to ourselves, smoke and mirrors that 100 Senators agreed to end back in 1974; and that piece of it has continued in place for 51 years until this moment, in this Senate, by this Republican majority, who says we are going to start lying to ourselves and lying to the American people about what this bill costs.
Well, we are not going to lie. We are going to tell you the truth. This bill costs well over $3 trillion over 10 years and some $30 trillion-plus on top of existing deficits and debt because of the provisions that are in this particular bill.
Our current national debt that has been run up since the Declaration of Independence is around $36.5 trillion. This bill basically matches that in creating that much additional debt over the next 30 years. This is a huge assault on the programs that we have sustained as a nation for the people of America and for people struggling to get on their feet. So we want affordable housing programs. We want to have fair and quality healthcare. We want to have an education system that gives every child an opportunity to thrive. We want to create a robust economy through investments so there are good jobs, because no government program is better than a good job. All of those are imperiled by this bill because the Republican leadership is lying to the American people and lying to themselves. So we are here to tell the truth.
First of all, we are going to turn to Senator Murray who, as I mentioned, was the Senate Budget chair from 2013 to 2015.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Oregon and our other Budget chairs and ranking members from previous years because this is really important.
There are some things you can't change with legislation despite what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle seem to believe. For example, one plus one is two, and while a trillion might have a lot of zeroes in it, it is, in fact, a much, much bigger number. Now, that might sound obvious, but, apparently, my colleagues across the aisle need a little reminder because,
After years of complaining about the debt--in fact, at the same time they are talking about how we need to address the debt--Republicans now are suddenly pretending they don't know how to count. Republicans are suddenly pretending the Parliamentarian doesn't exist if they don't talk to her. Republicans are suddenly pretending that precedent doesn't exist if they just fake amnesia and that norms and consequences for breaking them will just disappear if they wish them away really hard. My preschool students had more common sense.
Republicans should know, if they replace math with magic, if they tear up the Senate process, if they blow off the Senate Parliamentarian, that bill will come due--and not just the bill for $4 trillion blown on tax cuts for billionaires and corporations. The bill will also come due for trashing this Senate process and precedent when Republicans are no longer in the majority.
If Republicans are serious about plowing forward with rewriting or ignoring Senate procedure and the laws of mathematics, I would just ask: Spare me the empty excuses. Spare me the explanations that totally ignore the reality of what you are doing. I mean, do they really think it washes away everything to say: Oh, it is fine to break the process in half because we say it is fine; oh, it is fine; we have the authority to ignore math? Give me a break.
To every Republican who really thinks this is a convincing argument and to anyone who thinks ``we can'' is just acceptable rationale for going nuclear and pretending the most expensive bill in the history of our country can be paid for by some magic-bean counting, here is my challenge to you: Go back home and try that game with your constituents. Tell them it is OK. Yes, the debt is going to be $4 trillion and higher 10 years from now. That is true, but it is fine. We voted on it, and we get to say a trillion is actually zero. Go ahead. See how that works for you. And you may as well tell them you are voting against gravity next because that is just as reasonable.
And don't forget: When you tell your families back home that trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires and companies are free because you waved a wand or you said some magic words, don't forget to tell them those are just tax cuts for the billionaires, not for working families.
Don't forget to tell the folks back home: Yeah, I voted to say a trillion dollars is nothing, but we still need to kick people off of their healthcare. That is just too expensive. We still need to close those hospitals. We have to cut costs. And we still have to kick people off SNAP because the debt is out of control.
Don't forget to mention: No, we can't afford childcare. We can't afford paid family leave. We can't afford to solve your problems.
Magic math is apparently just for billionaires. You all are getting less.
Please, Republicans, send that message to your constituents. Just see how it goes over because you can fool yourself, but you are not going to fool the American people. They don't get to balance their budget with magic math. They don't get to pretend $1 trillion is nothing. And they don't get to pretend that this bill is free because at the end of the day, regardless of what policy baseline you all want to use in DC, those families back home are the ones who will be paying the actual cost.
I yield to Senator Merkley.
Would the Senator yield for a question?
In the time that you were Budget chair, did you ever contemplate a situation in which you argued that renewing a tax break that was by law expiring would somehow have no impact on the deficit?
To my friend from Oregon, I never would have contemplated it, and I never would have put it forward. I happen to know that if I would have suggested that, my Republican colleagues would have been all over me, telling me that breaks the rules.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Returning to Senator Whitehouse, who was Senate Budget chair from 2023 to 2025.
Thank you, Senator Merkley.
I mentioned earlier the history of the section that the Republican Budget chairman is using to perform this multitrillion-dollar magical act of making huge, deficit-busting numbers disappear. It is called section 312. It has been used before, but it has always been minor, corrective, and bipartisan.
I mentioned earlier the adjustment that was made on a bipartisan basis to the Power Marketing Administration's numbers to return the CBO to an agreement that the Senate had previously made. That was not enormously consequential. This is almost certainly the first time you are hearing about it.
Again, in 2023, as Budget chair, with Republican Chair Jodey Arrington on the House side, we made a $105 million adjustment to a dairy program. Today, we are talking about trillions. This was a $105 million adjustment--again, bipartisan, minor, and corrective, fixing a technical issue on a bipartisan basis.
Last year, Speaker Johnson and Leader Schumer agreed to direct CBO to score a feed program with an OMB estimate, and they used this rule again--collaborating on a bipartisan basis on a matter that was minor and corrective.
Well, this is different. This is trillions, and Republicans are using this rule to pretend that it is not.
There are a lot of ways to look at who is right. Time, obviously, will tell, but this bill actually has a ``tell'' right in it. Page 754 of this bill is the reality check on whether or not they are running up the debt by trillions. We know they are running up the debt by trillions because they say so in this bill.
You can play Senate procedural fakery, you can wave magic wands around numbers all day long, but someday soon, you hit reality, and you hit reality in the real world of markets and selling Treasury bonds and having a legal debt limit.
If this did not raise the debt by trillions, they would not need to raise the debt limit by trillions.
Here is the text:
They are dodging the Parliamentarian's ruling by letting the Budget chair make a trillion-dollar magic-wand maneuver because they know pretty darn well what the Parliamentarian's ruling would be. And how do they know what the Parliamentarian's ruling would be? Because the answer is in their own damned bill.
I yield the floor.
Would the Senator from Rhode Island yield for a question?
You mentioned the use of section 312, which gives some flexibility to resolve, as you put it, minor issues on a bipartisan basis to correct an issue, a technical issue. In those cases you mentioned, were those on a reconciliation bill?
Were they on a reconciliation bill? I don't believe they were.
No, they were not. In fact, that power has never been used on a reconciliation bill because the following section, 313, gives very specific instructions. It says each provision must be costed out for its impact on both outlays, the spending side, or revenue, should it be a revenue measure.
If you are saying ``Well, how do I do that?'' you say ``Well, if we pass this provision, what will it cost as compared to not passing this provision, not having it in the bill?'' That is a comparison to current law.
This ability of the Budget chair--and actually the law says the Budget Committee--to correct technical issues or narrow issues on a bipartisan basis basically solves snarly little budgeting questions, like on the dairy program that you mentioned. It was never used on reconciliation, ever; never used on a broad basis, ever; never used to create a lie about what a bill costs in this fashion.
Now, we are turning to the Senator from Maryland, who was ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee for 6 years, so he brings a lot of experience and knowledge about the budget process.
Senator Van Hollen.
Mr. President, I thank my colleague and the ranking
I just want to start by reading a statement. This is a quote:
That wasn't from Senator Van Hollen or anyone on this floor; that is from a Republican Member of the House, Congressman Schweikert from Arizona, talking about exactly the issue we are debating here in the U.S. Senate.
Let me read you another quote--a little more colorful--again about this Republican accounting fraud:
That is Republican Congressman Chip Roy of Texas.
They are right. This is a fraud. This is a fraud that would make the Enron scammers blush.
I quote those House Members for a reason, because we can disagree with what they did in their bill--and I strongly disagree with it--but at least they used honest math, and at least they used the math that is required by the rules here in the Senate, the honest math that Republicans here in the Senate want to dodge because it will both tell the American people just how big the deficits are but also because it will screw up their whole entire plan.
Just so people listening have some sense of how these Senate numbers are designed to disguise the real impact of their deficits, look at, for example, the basic individual tax rates in the House bill. When they extended those tax rates from the Trump 2017 bill, it cost $2.2 trillion under what we call the current law baseline, which is the reality baseline because that is what it will cost when you understand that they sunset at the end of this year, and that is what it will cost to renew them.
So under honest accounting, it is $2.2 trillion. Under the Senate fraudulent accounting, that $2.2 trillion deficit miraculously becomes an $83 billion deficit.
Let's look at the House permanent extension of key deductions for businesses. That would cost--honest accounting--$821 billion; under the Senate accounting scam, $6 billion.
So what we are seeing here is this blatant, deliberate effort to mislead the American people about the true costs of this bill, about the deficit impacts of this bill, about how it will impact the debt.
We all know that when the debt goes up and we have to put more of our costs on Uncle Sam's credit card, it puts upward pressure on interest rates. That means Americans will pay higher interest rates on their mortgages, on their car loans, and everything else.
So when you try to hide the deficit impact, you really are trying to fool the American people, and we are here to blow the whistle.
Now, I just want to show our colleagues something that was put together by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. If you look at the blue, you can see that for each year, starting this year--2025, 2026--the blue is what Senate Republicans claim their bill will add to the deficit. The red is how much more it will actually add to the deficit.
So at the end of this 10-year period, what you see is that Senate Republicans are claiming that their bill will add $441 billion, which is still a big number, but the real number, when you do honest accounting, when you add up all of these, is $4.2 trillion--a much bigger number.
I do want to point something out on this chart that I think everybody watching should understand. If you look at these orange parts--these are the additional deficits from tax cuts--starting here, in year 2029, 2030, you will see that they actually do start going down. Why is that? It is because the tax cut that President Trump promised for no tax on tips--they phase those out. This is all just a make-believe ruse: Yes, we start providing no tax on tips, but those disappear.
The tax breaks for wealthy people--they go on, and they go on not just for this 10-year period. But the reason they violate all the rules of reconciliation is because they keep going on after that.
As Senator Merkley said, if you look at the entire history of the Byrd rule--that is Senator Byrd--it was designed to make sure that 51 Senators, through a vote, could not make these kinds of permanent changes in any area, but specifically they were worried about areas that would increase the national deficit and debt.
So what Republican Senators are doing is not only misleading the American people, but they are violating the entire structure that carved out this special procedure that we call reconciliation for the budget, which was intended to lower deficits and debts, not have them go on forever.
As Senator Merkley has pointed out, I think if you look over a 30- year period, we are talking about $35 trillion-plus additional to the debt, and Republicans want to hide that from the American people.
That is budget fraud, pure and simple, and it is a violation of the rules of the U.S. Senate, this whole special structure that was created not to blow bigger holes in the debt and deficits but to actually try to constrain them. So shame on everybody who is part of this fraud on the American people.
I yield the floor.
Would the Senator from Maryland yield for a question?
I find it very interesting that the Senator pointed out that these tax provisions for the middle class--that no tax on tips is phased out and no tax on overtime is phased out.
And what the Senator is saying, I believe, is that when they put into this bill that a tax break is ending, they are saying that it doesn't cost any more in the following years.
So they are simply saying--their current policy baseline that they want us to make believe about would say that this wouldn't cost them; in other words, if they extended this, it wouldn't cost anything.
It is interesting to note--and not only does that expose the fraud behind the current policy baseline, but they made a very deliberate choice. Even though they now say that they can make these tax cuts permanent and still comply with the rules, they decided to make the tax cuts for very rich people permanent. But even though they say it is not going to cost anything anymore to provide tax cuts with no tax on tips, they are phasing those out.
And all of these areas are where President Trump made promises that he was going to take care of some working people. Well, those go away fast. The tax cuts for the rich, they go on for not just a full 10 years, but they keep going, which is why this is a violation of the entire reconciliation process.
So I find two things very interesting. They are saying, if something was in the law that they passed in 2017 and it expires, they are pretending it doesn't expire and that, therefore, extending it doesn't cost anything. But in their own bill, when they say a provision expires, they are saying: No, it really does die, and, therefore, we are saving money in the years after.
How are those two things possibly consistent?
Clearly, they are not. I mean, this is literally magical thinking. This is why Republican Congressman Chip Roy called this ``fairy dust'' and why the Congressman from Arizona said this was pure intellectual and economic fraud. That is what it is. That is the bottom line.
Well, I thank the Senator from Maryland for also pointing out that President Trump--he did--when he was campaigning, say he was fighting for ordinary families. But at his inauguration, who did he have standing behind him? Not champions for healthcare or champions for housing, and certainly not champions for nutrition or education, but, in fact, a series of five or six billionaires.
And now you are telling me that, in this bill--and I want to make sure the American people understand this--the provisions that were sweeteners to say we were helping working people are being phased out, but they are keeping all the tax breaks for billionaires.
Well, the Senator is right. It was right down this hall, actually, that President Trump was sworn in, and he said it was going to be a new golden age for working people. Well, as you are pointing out and this chart clearly shows and their own budget reveals, it is clearly a golden
They had a few little crumbs that they were throwing for a little while, we can see, to others, but just for a little while and just small amounts compared to the golden age for the billionaires.
Well, I must say, my impression is--and I hope the Senator will correct me if I am wrong--that the Republicans are embarrassed by the fact that they are proposing a bill that creates over $3 trillion in debt in 10 years and over $30 trillion over 30 years and that the vast bulk of it goes to billionaires.
And so they want to say: We are so embarrassed because we mentioned fiscal responsibility when we were running for office. We were going to get the budget under control.
And they are doing the opposite, and they are embarrassed that they are doing these cuts in programs to fund tax breaks for billionaires, cutting regular healthcare--16 million people losing healthcare--for tax breaks for billionaires that, as the Senator pointed out, go on and on and on and are actually permanent.
Would the Senator yield for a question?
I yield to my colleague from Rhode Island.
When I was budget chairman and we were trying to focus, for instance, on the impending economic nightmare coming our way through climate-caused property insurance failures, what I would get is nonstop regular lectures from Republicans on the Budget Committee about how we had to take responsibility for the deficit, we had to reduce the debt. Nothing else mattered as much. It was absolutely vital.
Now, of course, we see that, as their very first shot with the power to do anything through their majority and using reconciliation, they are raising the debt, and they are raising the deficit--and not by a little but by trillions.
And I am wondering if, in the Senator's time as chairman or perhaps if in Senator Murray's time on the committee or perhaps in Senator Van Hollen's time over on the House committee, you were favored with such constant lecturing by Republicans about the debt and the deficit and how credible that all seems right now.
I yield to Senator Murray.
I thank the Senator for his question because it is just stunning to me that the vast majority of debate--in fact, all the debate--that came from Republicans at the time I was chair of the Budget Committee and trying to put forward a smart budget for the United States of America--the only thing they talked about--was debt and deficit. The only challenge they made to us was debt and deficit. The only time we tried to do anything for childcare, for healthcare, they threw the debt at us.
So this is pretty stunning to me that, now that they need to raise the debt for giving tax breaks to the very rich people who stood behind the President at his inauguration, then they play with the numbers and pretend it is not real, and ``trillion'' all of a sudden becomes ``zero'' and: I am using some rule you have never heard of to try and pretend that this isn't real.
It is fairy dust.
I just want to say, to answer the question from the Senator from Rhode Island and pick up on what my colleagues have said, that when I was the senior Democrat, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan was the chairman of the committee. And, look, we disagreed on many things; we agreed on many things. We both agreed that we should get our deficits and debt under control. We had different ideas on how to do it. He wanted to privatize Medicare. We wanted to close tax breaks for the rich. But the reality is that the Holy Grail--the only guiding North Star for Republicans at that time-- was: We have got to bring down deficits and debt.
This is not that Republican Party--not in any way, shape, or form. They clearly don't give a damn. In fact, they are worried, as we can see, that the American people still care, which is why they want to engage in this fraudulent scheme.
But I will just close on this: I remember one of those years--I believe it was the 2012 Republican convention--they even put up a debt clock. They put up a debt clock at the convention.
Right? I am looking under my desk for the debt clock here because the Republicans seem to have hidden it away forever. They want to wish it away. That is what they are telling us.
The bill, actually, is required to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion. So, in reality, there is a huge hit to our debt, huge additions to our deficit.
And it makes me a little bit frustrated to think back to all those lectures that I had to receive as budget chairman, which the Senator from Maryland witnessed as a longtime member of the Senate Budget Committee, which the ranking member witnessed in his time on the Budget Committee, and which Senator Murray experienced when she chaired the Budget Committee. We have been lectured to death by our colleagues. And at the very first instance when they had the power to do something about it, they went 180 in the other direction and are cranking the national debt in order to give big benefits to the rich people who fund their campaigns.
If the Senator would yield for a question--and I know we need to move on here--I just want to add one thing. It is not just that it is going to be debt. It is the cost to families because of this debt they are putting in place.
I would ask the chair of the Budget Committee now, as he knows as I do: People's houses are going to cost more because their mortgage interest rates are going to go up. Their car interest rates are going to go up.
These are not just magic numbers sitting out there pretending. Real families are going to feel the cost of this debt and this deficit.
I really appreciate that point from my colleague from Washington State because, in this bill, it creates so much necessitated borrowing that CBO estimates that that borrowing will cause interest rates to go up. And when interest rates go up for the Treasury, it goes up on your car loan, on your adjustable rate, the mortgage on your house, and just in general. These are costs that are borne by ordinary families.
And I find it very interesting because the Republicans were demanding what they called the dynamic score, saying: Well, won't these cuts produce such a great economy that it will kind of lift all boats and produce more revenue and maybe the deficit won't be as bad.
Here is what the Congressional Budget Office found. Again, that is the nonpartisan honest broker. They found that because of the interest rates rising as a result of this massive sea of red ink that necessitates massive borrowing that, in fact, those rising interest rates will hurt the economy.
So there is no dynamic score that produces: Oh, well, it isn't so bad after all.
No, it is the opposite, and, in fact, that dynamic argument has always been wrong.
And we are looking at the folks who lectured my colleague from Rhode Island. I sat through many of those lectures as well. And I, in my head, went: Wait a minute. Aren't these the folks who did the massive ocean of red ink in the 2001 Bush tax bill? Aren't these the same folks who produced a massive ocean of ink in another tax bill, 2 years later? Aren't these the same ones that, in 2017, did a massive ocean of red ink? And now they are doing it again? How could they possibly be putting themselves forward as deficit hawks or debt hawks, not to mention that they cheered on two adventures that were a huge tragedy for the United States of America--trying to occupy Afghanistan and going to war in Iraq--which together added $8 trillion to our debt?
And if you take a look at this chart, every time there is a Republican administration, the last deficit while they are in office compared to their first deficit goes up. For Clinton, it went down. That is fiscal responsibility. For George W. Bush, first term, it went up. For Obama, it went down. In other words, the Democratic Presidents, time after time after time--Clinton, Obama, Biden--they reduced the
So none of us want to hear any more talk about fiscal responsibility from across the aisle.
Do you want to be fiscally responsible? Vote no on this bill. This bill takes and fires 16 million people off of healthcare to finance those tax breaks for billionaires. This bill says 4 million children will go hungry to finance tax breaks for billionaires. This bill is ``families lose and billionaires win,'' and the debt goes up, endangering our ability to do basic programs for the entire next generation. It is wrong on every count.
And I think, collectively, we urge our colleagues to honor the argument they have made over time that, in fact, they were concerned about the deficit and they were concerned about American families, because if you are concerned about the deficit and debt, if you are concerned about families, you must vote no on this bill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, I really want to thank my colleagues. The Senator just said they used to call themselves deficit hawks. We need to call them deficit robins. They are robbing from you to pay for the billionaires. They are no longer deficit hawks. Agreed?
I thank my colleagues. And I think, as Senator Merkley said, if you care about the deficit and debt and you don't want working families to have to pay for these tax cuts for billionaires and the rich, vote no on the bill.
I would only add as my last words: Watch. Everybody who is here, watch as this goes forward, because we will give the Republicans a chance to reduce the increase to the debt and the deficit by peeling back just the tax cuts for the greedy billionaires.
We would be voting for working-class tax cuts, I am almost certain. We will have a chance to bring into stark focus through our amendments what really matters to the folks on the other side of the aisle. And that is the tax cuts for the superwealthy, for the billionaires, for the corporations that are offshoring jobs, and for the biggest polluters in the country. That is where their sweet spot is, and we will expose that through these votes.
Mr. President, just a final word. Those votes, we are not sure when they will start because they are redrafting provisions of this bill right now. That is how little time this Senate will have to actually know what is in this 1,000-page bill with all kinds of special deals tucked into it for various Members. We will have little time because they are still writing it.
So those amendments that my colleague from Rhode Island mentioned-- stay tuned. We are not sure if those amendments are going to start at 2 in the morning or if they are going to start sometime later tomorrow, but stay tuned and pay attention because you are going to find out who stands with families and who stands to hurt families in favor of helping billionaires.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, I think it is a really important discussion that we had right now about the deficit and the debt, but I want to talk a little bit more about this bill, in general.
You know, recent KFF polling shows that this Republican ``Big Ugly Betrayal Bill'' is overwhelmingly unpopular. In fact, this thing is more underwater than the Titanic.
Nearly two in three Americans view this bill unfavorably. That goes up to nearly three in four when they learn it will kick millions-- millions--off their health insurance. And it goes up to nearly four in five when they learn it will choke off funding to their local hospital.
In other words, the more the American people hear about what is actually in this ``Big Ugly Betrayal Bill,'' the more they dislike it.
So with that in mind, I want to be here today to say a little bit more about what is in the Republicans' latest version. Spoiler alert: It is still big; it is still ugly; and it is an absolute betrayal of the people who sent us here to fight for them.
The Republican plan is still going to mean over 16 million people losing healthcare. As patients get kicked off their ACA plans, kids and struggling families will get kicked off Medicaid.
Rural hospitals are going to be forced to shut their doors. The Republican plan is still going to mean more starving families. New redtape is going to cut people off from their SNAP benefits that they need to put food on the table, and it is going to take away kids' school meals.
The Republican plan still rips away support from the people in this country who are struggling the most to give away billions in tax breaks to billionaires who need help the least.
In short, this latest version of the Republicans' bill would still be one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the people at the bottom to the people at the top in our Nation's history.
When it comes to healthcare, this Republican abomination will cause millions of people to lose their insurance and see their costs skyrocket in one way or another. It will create mountains of new paperwork and bureaucratic barriers that are positively meant to kick people off their Medicaid and ACA coverage. And there is new sabotage to the ACA healthcare markets, which will mean more people losing their affordable coverage.
Meanwhile, there is nothing--a big, fat zero--when it comes to renewing the tax credits Democrats passed to lower your healthcare costs. That is right. While Republicans are showering their billionaire donors in new tax breaks, they will not lift a finger to extend healthcare tax credits that are saving millions of families thousands of dollars a year on health coverage.
Instead, they are going to make sure people lose healthcare coverage, including our seniors, people with disabilities, pregnant women, millions of patients who rely on Medicaid. And let's not forget, the cuts in their bill are going to shutter hospitals across the country, especially in our rural areas.
Do you have Medicaid? Medicare? employer sponsored coverage? Regardless, Republicans have some pretty bad news for you because it hardly matters what insurance you are on when you don't have a hospital to get care anymore.
In Washington State, we have 14 rural hospitals that are fighting to survive and would likely close under this bill, mostly in areas represented by Republicans, I should add; not to mention, we have six rural labor and delivery units that could be forced to close their doors under this bill.
Do you know what the Senate Republicans did? They made that problem worse. They put even more pressure on our rural hospitals. I am telling you, this betrayal is getting bigger and uglier by the day, and this cannot get lost.
Republicans want to shut the doors of one of the biggest healthcare providers in the country. They want to defund Planned Parenthood. That is wildly harmful and wildly unpopular. It would shutter at least 200 health centers that provide a wide spectrum of care, including cancer screenings, Pap smears, and birth control for millions of women.
And let's not forget Republicans are cutting nutrition assistance too. This big ugly betrayal would make one of the biggest cuts to SNAP in history. We are talking around a $200 billion cut over the next 10 years. Now, it should be obvious, but that would be devastating for our country and for our kids' future.
And yet Republicans are not giving up on taking dinner off the table, taking school lunch off kids' trays, all so they can shovel tax cuts at billionaires and wealthy corporations.
It is worth underscoring the new redtape in their bill is even targeted at some of our most vulnerable families because it expands work requirements to apply to seniors and parents with kids in school.
When my dad--a World War II veteran--got sick with multiple sclerosis, he lost his job. He lost his job. My mom was at home--seven kids she was raising. My dad lost his job, and they had to spend--my mom had to spend some time getting some new skills so she could go back to work and take care of our family.
Do you know what? During that time, we had to rely on food stamps in
This is wrong.
Thanks to those food stamps, my family did get through that rough patch, and all seven of us kids grew up to give back to our communities, whether as a firefighter, middle schoolteacher, or even here as a U.S. Senator.
So I can't emphasize enough: Republicans want to cut families from SNAP and Medicaid Programs that give people a hand up in hard times. Why? So they can give an enormous handout to the richest people and the biggest companies in our country.
Oh, and at the same time, they are making it harder to afford groceries and healthcare. I should mention they are also gutting energy investments in a completely chaotic way. It is all but guaranteed to drive away jobs and drive up energy costs for all American families.
And at the same time in this bill, they are giving billionaires billions of dollars. Republicans are going to give students the short end of the stick. This big mess of a bill would tear away programs and protections that make it possible for many students to pursue a higher education. It eliminates grad PLUS loans. It cuts families off from parent PLUS loans. It punishes students who go into public service or a medical residency and more.
Meanwhile, they are tearing down the guardrails from gutting regulations that protect students whose universities commit fraud to opening up a Pandora's box for Pell grants with a new loophole that would let low-quality programs suck up our taxpayer dollars.
These changes are especially going to hurt students from low-income families and first-generation college students and our veterans. Some of them will have no way to go to college when Republicans take their support away.
Some will be driven into predatory private loans they can't afford, and some will get lured into low-quality programs that take their money, waste taxpayer dollars, and leave the student worse off.
If that wasn't enough, if the Secretary of Education wanted to try to stop this kind of fraud and protect students, Republicans will leave them about as much authority as the school hall monitor because in this bill, Republicans prevent any Secretary of Education from making regulations that carry added benefits for borrowers.
And it hardly matters if that is a good impact like saving students money, protecting taxpayer dollars from fraud, or making higher education more accessible. Republicans are going to make problems worse and make fixing them even harder. Students in this country should be outraged.
I want to be perfectly clear about something: If Republicans charge ahead with this big awful mess, which they seem intent on doing, they can kiss any last shred of credibility goodbye, as we just talked about, when it comes to pretending to care about balancing the budget or addressing the national debt.
The idea was already laughable. For the entirety of the 21st century, the biggest driver of the national debt has been tax cuts that Republicans championed. But now, as we just talked about, they want to put at least $4 trillion--that is trillion with a ``t''--on the national credit card. Why? So they can shower the richest people on the planet with more money.
And then they are pretending all the math works, and it is kind of just easy peasy if they only just--they can do it if they kick people off healthcare or take enough meals away from kids or close enough hospitals or, better still, use some absurd accounting gimmick to pretend--to pretend--that billions of dollars in new tax cuts for their billionaire donors actually just don't cost anything.
Well, I have got some bad news for Republicans: Your math is terrible, and so is this bill. This thing is very expensive, and you don't have to take my word for it. Ask the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which just said the latest version of this bill will add 4 trillion--``t'' trillion--to the debt just over the next 10 years.
If Republicans want to ignore them, you can also ask the fiscal hawks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. They calculate that the House bill adds $5 trillion to our debt when you include interest payments and the costs of making temporary provisions in this bill permanent. And we are told the Senate bill is even less fiscally responsible.
Everyone agrees this thing is not beautiful, but it is recklessly big, and it won't just increase the debt; it will blow it up. This may very well be the most expensive bill in history. I say it may be because Republicans are still planning changes. We have not yet gotten the final bill.
They already cut out even more taxes for multinational corporations. SNAP benefits, they are still on the chopping block. Healthcare, still on the chopping block. In fact, they want to cut Medicaid even more painfully. We may not know how expensive the Republicans' bill will be in the end, but we know who is paying for it--it is you, working families.
And it is important for people to know, as bad as this bill is, Republicans were trying to make it even worse. Now, Democrats have been fighting them every step of the way, and we have notched a few important wins by challenging every single provision we possibly could under the Senate rules.
So I want to talk about some of the things Democrats were successful in getting out because if Republicans had had their way, not only would this bill take away more food from our struggling families or shutter even more hospitals and kick even more people off their health insurance, it would have also sold off all of our public lands.
And instead of just slashing CFPB funding, it would have completely shuttered the doors of a very important Federal watchdog that protects Americans from getting scammed.
If Republicans had had their way, this bill would make it easier to buy gun silencers, harder to get your earned income tax credit, or pay off your student loans, and effectively impossible to get insurance plans on the Marketplace to cover abortion care.
If Republicans would have had their way, this bill would have also given Trump more power to deny funding to our constituents on a whim and less power for the courts to stop him.
We are talking about a full smorgasbord of really awful, unpopular ideas and policies that would have hurt our families and weakened our democracy--ideas that were this close to making it into this bill. But Republicans did not have their way. Democrats have been fighting back at every single step. We got those provisions tossed in the shredder, and we are still doing our darndest to send the rest of the bill to the shredder as well.
Now, let's be clear. When we talk about how unpopular this bill is with the American people, the reason is simple: This bill polls like garbage because it is garbage. That is why it should go nowhere except a trash bin.
Democrats are going to keep pushing back on this monstrosity with absolutely everything we have got at every step that we can. We are not going to stand by as Republicans shutter hospitals so the richest people in the country can build another vacation home. We are not going to sit around and let Republicans kick millions of people off of their insurance and raise working families' premiums so corporate executives can get a bigger bonus. We are not going to be silent as Republicans take food away from struggling families so they can help billionaires fuel up their private jets. We are going to keep speaking up, we are going to keep pushing back, and we are going to make sure everyone-- everyone--knows exactly what is going on here.
This bill is deeply unpopular--that much is clear--but if Republicans keep pushing for this disaster, buckle up because we are only going to keep getting louder and louder about how big this is, how ugly it is, and it is only going to get more unpopular with the folks back home as these provisions are enacted if this bill passes.
I am pretty astounded by how far some Republicans are trying to stick their heads in the sand on this. One Republican Senator told their concerned constituents ``We're all going to die.''
You would think my colleagues would show a bit more concern about that. Instead, that Senator actually doubled down, and in a response video, she filmed walking through a cemetery. I don't know how you get out of touch that much to misunderstand this, but let me be clear about something to our Republicans: ``Whistling past the graveyard'' is a metaphor to stop ignoring dangers; it is not a literal messaging suggestion.
If you thought Republicans couldn't be any more dismissive to their own constituents, this week, another Republican Senator who was speaking about people voicing their concerns about these Medicaid cuts said people will ``get over it.''
I have news for every one of my Republican colleagues who is trying to deny the reality of this bill and pretend the fairy tales they are telling themselves are true: When someone's local hospital closes, they don't get over it. When someone's kid is kicked off healthcare, they do not get over it.
If Republicans don't want to take my word for it, they can listen to the doctor I spoke with, who warned that when patients go uninsured, they delay care, and it increases costs for everyone. Instead of paying $10 for diabetic medication, we will pay $10,000 for an amputation.
Or Republicans can actually read the countless letters I am getting from my constituents sharing their stories:
Or, I am a full-time caregiver for my daughter with cerebral palsy or my son with spina bifida or my elderly mother, and this bill threatens to kick them off their healthcare and the supportive services they rely on to survive.
Better yet, Republicans can go out and talk to their own constituents, because I have no doubt they will hear similar stories. They will even come to you. Advocates have been here in DC all week. I have seen them in the halls. I have heard them from my office.
Now the Republicans can listen to the people across the country who are warning them about this bill, and they can do the right thing and abandon this effort or they can keep ignoring them. But make no mistake, in the end, the American people will have their voices and their votes heard, because at the end of the day, this bill, this monstrosity of a bill, is all in the goal of a tax break for multibillionaires and corporations, and the way they pay for it is by taking away your healthcare and your nutrition, the things your family or your neighbors or people you know rely on. That is just wrong, it is un-American, and we are fighting back.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I rise today to oppose this partisan reconciliation bill. Republicans have named it the One Big Beautiful Bill, but you would only lose that kind of title if you were trying to hide something. And here is the simple truth: This bill takes health insurance and food assistance away from millions of Americans and gives President Trump's billionaire and millionaire friends giant tax cuts.
Indeed, this bill would provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax giveaways to the country's 902 billionaires and millionaires while kicking 17 million Americans off their health insurance. Just weigh the balance: 902 billionaire beneficiaries with extraordinary tax deductions and tax benefits versus denial of healthcare to 17 million Americans. It doesn't balance.
And despite slashing healthcare, somehow this bill will add trillions of dollars to our national debt. It will further weaken our financial position in the world. It will, indeed, have many countries wondering if the United States is, as it has been since the end of World War II, the place to put their resources, their investments, their reserves.
This could have profound fiscal and monetary implications to the United States, and if you tie that together with this tariff battle, we are headed economically in the wrong direction, as we are socially.
And this bill is loaded with outrageous special interest giveaways and President Trump's personal political priorities; for example, $7.5 billion for wealthy developers to use for luxury housing and other high-priced developments at a time when affordable housing for working families is a crisis in every State in the country; $1.7 billion for gunmakers who will be able to sell silencers, sawed-off shotguns, short-barreled rifles, and other very dangerous weapons and components tax-free, making our streets more dangerous for police and for the American people, and, indeed, especially for the police because they are the first responders. They are the ones that are typically going to the door wondering if the person behind that door has an automatic weapon or some other weapon designed not to hunt or shoot but to kill.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax cuts for extraordinarily wealthy oil-and-gas companies, and $40 million for a Garden of Heroes, a sculpture garden to honor President Trump's favorite historical personalities. And at the same time, it slashes the budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which makes sure that shady payday lenders, mortgage lenders, and banks don't fleece American families.
And, in particular, the military division of the CFPB protects men and women in the uniform of the United States. We were able to pass an interest cap of 36 percent for Active-Duty personnel, and that is going to be ignored because there is no one to enforce it.
And we are going to see, as we have in the past, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen exploited--systematically exploited--by all those little automobile shops and payday lenders and everything else that surrounds every military base in this country.
It is a tale as old as time. My Republican colleagues showering the rich with tax benefits and prioritizing favored industries and friends. President Bush joined with the Republican Congress to do that; of course, I opposed it. And by the way, when President Bush did that, we were projected to have over the next 10 years a multitrillion-dollar surplus. Of course, this legislation will lead us to a multitrillion- dollar deficit, and it is interesting because when I was younger, the Republicans all associated themselves with fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, surpluses. That is not the case now.
President Trump exacerbated the situation in his first term by his grand giveaway, but this time, President Trump and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are depriving millions of Americans of their healthcare coverage to pay for it. They are intent on punishing the most vulnerable Americans in this bill simply for the crime of being poor--in fact, in many cases, despite working very long hours and being poor.
I came here to Congress to the Senate after serving my country in the U.S. Army, as the Presiding Officer did with great distinction in the U.S. Navy as a Navy SEAL. I came here to serve my constituents and improve the lives of average Americans, and I think most of my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans alike, came with the same goal.
And according to press reports, a few of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are starting to realize that this bill is going to do great damage to their constituents. One Republican colleague has warned that this bill could leave 600,000 of his constituents without healthcare coverage and blow a $38 billion hole in his State's budget. That would be a devastating effect.
One of the other aspects of this attack on our healthcare system is there are some people that believe, well, Medicaid doesn't touch me. It certainly does because when you extract that much money from the healthcare system, what will private health insurance do? They will raise their rates. Everyone will be paying more, and some won't be able to afford it. They will have to go without coverage. And that is going to be a tragedy for this country.
Now, knowing the damage this bill is going to do, one must ask why would
I have been meeting, for example, with Christina from Smithfield, RI, for many years. Her daughter Lauren was born with cystic fibrosis and has endured countless hospitalizations, procedures, medications, and other challenges as she navigates her life with this disease. Christina, Lauren, and their family have private insurance, but Medicaid also helps cover the expenses not covered by private insurance for people with serious illnesses who are not able to work.
When President Trump and congressional Republicans began proposing these cuts to Medicaid, Christina told me:
Carolina from Central Falls, RI, shared similar concerns for her daughter.
Indeed. And now we are looking across the aisle for courage and leadership to reject this flawed bill.
I received an email from one constituent, Wally from Cranston, RI. She is a 71-year-old retiree on Medicare. Her husband is 72, with Alzheimer's disease, living in a nursing home under hospice care and relying on Medicaid for his healthcare. She wrote to me that she was ``terrified at all the cuts to programs and services'' that she and her husband so desperately rely on. Without Medicaid, she wonders if she or her husband would be able to continue receiving care.
I also heard from Diane in Coventry, RI, whose daughter gets lifesaving care through Medicare. Diane said:
Now, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle may say: We are not going to cut these people's Medicaid; we are just going after the fraudsters, the freeloaders who aren't working.
Now, who exactly are these fraudsters and freeloaders? Is it the elderly patient who needs expensive nursing home care? Is it the child with a serious, chronic health condition? Should we cut off these people's access to healthcare because they can't work, they physically cannot work, or because the constant paperwork requirements got lost in the shuffle?
Let's be clear. If my colleagues were serious about eliminating fraud, they would be providing States with more resources to investigate questionable claims and bad actors. Medicaid coverage is not extravagant; it is a lifeline. If my colleagues were sincere in their claims that these cuts are to protect the program ``for the people who need it the most,'' as the majority leader has claimed, then they would be investing the so-called savings back into Medicaid instead of blowing it on tax cuts for the well-off. Instead, this bill is cutting funding to States for Medicaid, and States will have no choice but to pick and choose who will get access to care.
But don't take my word for it. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, CBO, estimates that this bill will cause nearly 17 million Americans to lose their health insurance--17 million people. That is not fraud. It is just making it harder for people to get healthcare.
On top of that, even if you are one of the lucky ones who gets to keep your Medicaid, will you still be able to get care?
Nursing homes rely on Medicaid. More than 6 in 10 nursing home residents in Rhode Island are on Medicaid. As Medicaid funding is cut, what will nursing homes do? I imagine some will have to close their doors or dramatically reduce the number of beds.
So you can be one of these fairly well-to-do Rhode Islanders trying to get mom in a nursing home and you are willing to pay, but if it is closed or there are only 5 beds where there used to be 20, she is going to be where, in my generation, grandparents were: in the living room in a hospital bed being cared for--in those days, typically by your mother.
So this approach to Medicaid is going to touch every aspect of American life, and the same can be said about the community healthcare centers. Medicaid makes up a huge portion of the operating budget for community health centers, which provide primary, dental, and behavioral care to more than 200,000 Rhode Islanders. That is roughly one in five Rhode Islanders.
It is hard enough to find a doctor now; it will only get harder if a community health center closes its doors and thousands of patients don't have a doctor anymore. And where do all those patients end up when they can't get routine care? The emergency room. That means there will be lines out the door, and if you have a serious health event and need to get in, you better get used to waiting a long time.
This is not how a health system is supposed to run. And in Rhode Island, our health system is already on the brink. People are just getting by. People are waiting in the hallways of ERs for a bed upstairs. People are spending days on the phone trying to find a doctor.
We should be making these things better, not worse. But, again, Republicans' main priority seems not to be the physical or financial health of everyday Americans; it is providing massive tax cuts to President Trump's billionaire and millionaire friends.
There is certainly nothing wrong with being successful, and there is nothing wrong with wealth. That is something that has been part of the American dream since our beginning. But what it requires is opportunity, and one of the fundamental opportunities it requires is good health and good education. What this bill will do is destroy our healthcare system and force the States to make dramatic cuts to the education system. We are shutting down opportunity in America while we enrich the wealthy elite.
The American dream, as I believe it, is about the middle class and a government that is focused on them, not taking $1 trillion from Medicaid so Republicans can gift to those who have already benefited from many other gifts.
Let's put the enormity of this transfer to the wealthiest in perspective. There are about 128 million households in America. Yet somehow this bill gives the top one-tenth of 1 percent of households a $250,000 tax cut--a giveaway that is over three times larger than what the median American household makes in a year.
When confronted with this point, Republicans consistently try to hide the ball. Middle- and working-class Americans are getting tax cuts too, they say. Who cares if the rich get richer? Well,
While we are voting on this bill without a full analysis of its impact on households, the Congressional Budget Office found that the House-passed version would take around $1,600 away from these lowest income households each year after accounting for tax changes and benefits cuts. And it is not just low-income Americans. Researchers at Penn's Wharton School of Business have found that most Americans lose money under the House bill in future years too.
I want to be crystal clear. We need to reform our tax system. We need to make it fairer for working Americans, not just for the ultrawealthy. We hear from people so often that government is broken. They are right. Our tax system is unfair and needs reform. But giving the top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans an extra quarter of a million dollars every year is not fixing the government; it is just adding to the sense of unfairness and brokenness that so many citizens feel.
We can do a bipartisan tax bill that is both fully paid for and that helps average Americans. In fact, we almost did that last summer when the House passed a tax bill 357 to 70 that would have extended the child tax credit and reinstated tax cuts for businesses without increasing the deficit. Forty-eight bipartisan Senators voted for that bill in this very Chamber, but it was blocked because Republican leaders wanted to pass something like this bill before us today.
My Republican colleagues have drafted a bill that is neither paid for nor helps most Americans. Worst of all, they have chosen to take from the poor and the middle class and the working class to give to billionaires.
This bill is very bad policy. It is almost un-American if you believe that the essence of America, as expressed by one of our greatest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, is to give every person a fair chance in the race of life. This bill denies that chance to millions and millions of Americans while enhancing and filling the pockets of the wealthiest, and I oppose it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, I am honored to follow my colleague Senator Reed, and he is absolutely right that this bill is almost un- American. In fact, I would say it is un-American because it is so destructive to the middle class, to healthcare, to education, to basic fairness and decency in our great country, the greatest country in the history of the world.
It would balloon the debt and the deficit by $4 trillion, and yet my Republican colleagues have sought to disguise and hide that reprehensible pain and damage to the American system.
It would cut Medicaid by $930 billion, which means billions in cuts for Connecticut, hundreds of thousands of Connecticut children and families off Medicaid, food nutrition shredded, and student loans decimated.
These kinds of impacts on Connecticut are mirrored through the whole country.
And the American people are beginning to get it. That is why this bill--this so-called One Big Beautiful Bill--is so deeply unpopular--in fact, by a 2-to-1 majority.
I want to talk not only about Connecticut but two of the States that are represented by colleagues here. They are so-called red States. But make no mistake, this bill is seismically catastrophic not just for Connecticut but for the whole country and for Louisiana, where this measure, if it is passed, will mean that my colleagues from Louisiana are voting to kick roughly 250,000 people in their State off health insurance. They will be voting for a bill that could close 33 rural hospitals in their State alone and cost their State's healthcare providers $588 million for services that newly insured patients simply will not be able to pay back. Their State program would lose $4 billion.
That is Louisiana alone in funding.
These numbers are staggering, and they are the reason that every major health system in Louisiana is opposing this bill. Just yesterday, they sent a letter warning that cuts in this bill--and I am quoting the Louisiana healthcare providers here--``would be historic in their devastation and warrant our shared advocacy to protect our patients and the care we provide them in hospitals and clinics.''
I could go on about Louisiana. I am going to abbreviate my remarks and ask unanimous consent to put my full statement in the Record.
This bill also reduces SNAP benefits for 206,000 Louisianians. It eliminates the benefits entirely for 94,000 of them.
I want to see my colleagues from Louisiana go home and face their constituents, having cut the legs from SNAP and the Medicaid Program and many other benefits.
And in Utah, that same tragic scenario is unfolding in a State where 337,000 children and adults depend on Medicaid. Nearly half of all children in Utah are covered by Medicaid and 59 percent of nursing home residents, and 60,000 people living in rural Utah communities are covered by Medicaid.
If this bill passes, at least 180,000 Utahns will lose healthcare coverage, and Utah's uninsured rate will increase by a staggering 67 percent. If this bill passes, 31,000 of the people in Utah could see their benefits slashed, and 13,000 would risk losing their benefits entirely.
I just want to say, in conclusion, these numbers for Connecticut, for Louisiana, for Utah, for the State of Washington--and my wonderful colleague Senator Cantwell will be talking shortly--they are not just numbers. They are faces. They are lives. They are children who are just beginning to be Americans, and their productivity and their contributions back to America will be hamstrung. Their lives will be financially handicapped, and healthwise, they will be impaired as a result of these irresponsible and reprehensible cuts.
I couldn't be angrier about these kinds of cuts in programs, done only so that the ultrawealthy will receive tax cuts. I am willing to bet that a lot of those billionaires and millionaires would forego those tax benefits if they understood the consequences. But my Republican colleagues, who are in disarray at this moment, they can't come together on a program because they know how abhorrent its effects would be on their States. They ought to listen to the people of America, not the ultrawealthy. The people are speaking in the polls. They are speaking through their elected representatives. And they are speaking because their conscience simply won't let them support a bill that does such abhorrent damage to the American middle class, the American way of life, and American values.
I am proud to stand here. I wish we weren't here going all night into Monday morning. But I am proud to stand here with my colleagues. I just wish my Republican colleagues were on the same side of these issues, because they are going to go home, and they will have to face the children and families who will be hurt so deeply by this bill.
Mr. President, I stand here today to, again, express my staunch opposition to the proposed Republican reconciliation bill. This legislation includes sweeping cuts that would raise costs for the American people and make it harder to access health care and food.
Over the past few weeks, my Democratic colleagues and I have spoken at length about the impact this bill would have on everyday Americans. This reconciliation bill is not about savings or government efficiency. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office found just last night that it will INCREASE the deficit by $4 trillion.
Instead, this bill funds tax cuts for billionaires by gutting life sustaining services like SNAP and Medicaid that help everyone else. It will cut $930 billion from Medicaid--that is $930 billion that helps states provide health care services to their residents--and lead to nearly 12 million people losing coverage. That's 12 million people who won't have health insurance when their child breaks their arm on the playground, or when they feel a lump that could be cancer.
This budget is a disaster for Connecticut.
But this budget will not just harm Connecticut. It will not just harm those living in blue states. This budget will harm Americans in every state across the country. That is why I am joining my Democratic colleagues to share some of the impacts this legislation will have on the Americans whose
In Louisiana, nearly 2 million people are enrolled in Medicaid. This includes 64% percent of moms giving birth, 54% percent of children, and 74% percent of seniors in nursing homes. One-fifth of Louisiana's Medicaid population lives in a rural area where access to coverage is already difficult.
Medicaid also supports school health professionals, like speech pathologists, occupational therapists and school psychologists. Without Medicaid, many of the 96,000 students with disabilities in Louisiana schools could have essential services ripped away from them. Is Louisiana expected to pick up the bill for these kids? Will the parents be forced to pay? Or will these children just lose out on these services entirely because their legislators decided that tax cuts for the rich are more important?
Currently, the state of Louisiana receives $13 billion in federal Medicaid funding every year. That means that my colleagues from Louisiana are voting to kick roughly 250,000 people in Louisiana off their health insurance. The majority of the Louisiana Congressional Delegation is poised to vote for a bill that could close 33 rural hospitals and cost the state's health care providers $588 million for services that newly uninsured patients simply will not be able to pay back. The state Medicaid program would lose $4 billion in funding.
These numbers are staggering, but they will never fully capture the impact on Louisiana families. How many couples will now have to pay out of pocket if they want to have a baby? How many will simply forgo having a child altogether? How many grandparents will see their care worsen because of cuts to nursing homes? How many kids will miss a doctor's appointment because mom and dad can't afford to pay the bill? These cuts aren't just numbers--they will impact lives and livelihoods for everyone, even those who keep their coverage.
That is why every major health system in Louisiana is opposing this bill. Just yesterday, they sent a letter warning that the cuts in this bill, and I am quoting Louisiana health care providers here, ``would be historic in their devastation and warrant our shared advocacy to protect our patients and the care we provide them at our hospitals and clinics.''
That is straight from the people providing care in Louisiana. Historic devastation for the state.
The letter went on to say, and I quote: ``[The] economic consequences pale in comparison to the harm that will be caused to residents across the state, regardless of insurance status, who will no longer be able to get the care that they need.''
The letter highlighted nearly 17,000 jobs likely to be lost in the State and tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. It is just senseless. It is a senseless cut to the State's budget, to the State's health care system, and to the State's economy.
However, Republicans are not stopping there. They are also going after SNAP benefits.
In Louisiana, one in six people live with food insecurity. The SNAP program helps. This federal program feeds hungry people. That is it. That is what the program does. SNAP supports 849,163 people in Lousiana, including over 22,000 veterans, 33% of households with older adults, and 50% of households with children. That means 377,258 children in Louisiana were fed, in part, by SNAP. This bill would reduce SNAP for 206,000 Louisianans and eliminate the benefit entirely for 94,000.
I want to be clear about what this means. SNAP feeds people. These taxpayer dollars make sure children and veterans have enough food to eat. They make sure our friends and loved ones who have fallen on hard times don't go hungry. They make sure our neighbors can afford to share a meal with family.
We can debate day and night about our Federal spending, but this funding--keeping our Nation fed--should not be controversial. But this bill will force people to go hungry. It will force kids to lose out on school meals. It will overwhelm already stretched Louisiana food banks. People facing hunger in Louisiana report needing an estimated $528 million more per year to meet their food needs. This bill will exacerbate that. Simply put, the Federal cuts in this bill will force people in Louisiana to go hungry or pay more at the grocery store.
A similar and tragic scenario would unfold in Utah where 337,000 children and adults depend on Medicaid. Nearly half of all children in Utah are covered by Medicaid, 59% of nursing home residents in Utah are covered by Medicaid, and 60,000 people living in rural Utah communities are covered by Medicaid. If this bill passes at least 180,000 Utahns will lose health coverage, and Utah's uninsured rate will increase by a staggering 67%.
As a result of this bill, Utah's health care system will lose an estimated $559 million per year in Federal funding, making it nearly impossible for the State to maintain current levels of coverage, benefits, and payments to providers.
Providers in Utah are speaking out. Kasey Shakespear, from the Rural Health Association of Utah, said of the bill, and I am quoting him here: ``It's going to dramatically reduce the support rural Utah is getting from the state of Utah and take a lot of resources away from them that are crucial to their success.''
An OB-GYN from Utah specifically spoke about the impact of the Republican bill on pregnant women and their newborn infants. He said: ``I don't think I can count the number of times where Medicaid has made a difference in my practice.''
He told us about the women he saw in his practice who, because of Medicaid coverage, were able to bring home a healthy baby. Moms in Utah who did not have to worry about accessing care or how to pay for coverage, and whose pregnancy complications were kept to a minimum as a result. This Utah doctor said, and I am quoting him again here: ``If Congress slashes Medicaid funding, this kind of care disappears for thousands of Utahns.''
Do my colleagues from Utah really support taking away support for new moms and their children?
Utahns will also face greater food insecurity. Right now, one in seven people in the State struggle to put food on the table and more than 178,000 residents depend on SNAP. This include nearly 5,000 veterans, 56% of households with children, and 32% of households with older adults.
If this bill passes, 31,000 Utahns could see their benefits slashed and 13,000 would be at risk of losing their benefits entirely. This could have severe consequences for the Utah Food Bank, the primary food bank distributing food to a network of over 200 partner agencies across the state.
These statistics are not just numbers, and these cuts are not abstract. They represent real people, real families, and real harm. It is our duty to protect our constituents, but it is also our duty to protect the American people. As U.S. Senators, we were not elected by a political party. We were elected by the constituents in our States who entrusted us with the responsibility of representing and protecting them at the highest level.
In publishing this reconciliation bill forward, my Republican colleagues are prioritizing partisan loyalty.
My Republican colleagues have access to the same data that I do. They know how devastating this bill would be and I implore them to remember that their responsibility is to their constituents, and the people of the country, and not to President Trump and his billionaire cronies.
I want to conclude by reading from the letter that Louisiana healthcare organizations sent. The letter ends by saying, and I quote the Louisiana healthcare community here: ``Protecting Medicaid is not just about avoiding budget cuts; it is a commitment to our shared values of community, resilience, and economic vitality.''
The letter goes on, and I quote: ``We take no pleasure in having to speculate about the impact of these cuts. However, in light of the cuts being proposed, we must have honest conversations together, and with you--the communities we serve. Louisiana and our healthcare delivery system are at a crossroads. We face the largest cut to healthcare in our state's history. Will our leaders in Washington choose to protect the health of our people, hospitals and economy? We are counting on them to do so.''
Mr. President, all of us, in Connecticut, in Utah, and in Louisiana, are counting on them, too. Let's hope our commitment to shared values rises above partisan politics, and that this devastating bill can be voted down.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, I rise to ask my colleagues to turn down this legislation in front of us--to reject it and instead work together on fiscal policy that would help us by growing our economy more successfully and not devastating for our constituents.
Before I start, I want to thank the Presiding Officer for speaking up about not selling public lands. I very much appreciate his voice in that debate--and critical that we were able to successfully get that out of this legislation.
I want to work across the aisle to talk about these policies so that we can move our country forward in a competitive fashion. But I am afraid that what we have in front of us is not the answer to what will make America competitive, particularly at a time when we are putting tariffs on American imported products, when we are basically getting into a trade war, and when we are devastating what I think is the underpinning of the economy of today, that is an Information Age innovation economy, and here we are devastating all of our investments in NIH and NSF and in the competitiveness that we just implemented in the IRA and the CHIPS and Science Act that is making us the envy of countries around the world for innovation.
We do have great capital markets, and those capital markets help us innovate. And I think some of my colleagues think, well, we have a promise to families here to give them a tax break, and while many of us would support that, you are asking us also to give tax breaks to big corporations before they can get their tax break.
And that, we don't like. We don't like it because it raises the cost on everybody, and that cost for middle-class and lower-income people will be devastating, particularly at a time when we continue with this tariff policy.
This bill would make the entire healthcare system less responsive and more expensive for everyone by dismantling Medicaid and shifting more of the cost burden onto States and threatening the very existence of rural hospitals.
This bill also sells spectrum out from under our national defense and safety Agencies and forces States to choose between protecting their citizens from dangerous AI or providing broadband service. And it just gives away big breaks to companies like Meta--that is Facebook--or Google, who I am sure at this point in time don't really need that additional tax break.
Clearly, though, the most egregious and certainly most destructive part of this reconciliation is the changes to healthcare--the fact that 17 million people will be uninsured and raise the cost on everyone. This is from the Congressional Budget Office.
We don't need to be raising healthcare costs on our constituents. The CBO analysis revealed that hasty, negotiated updates by Republicans discussed behind closed doors early Saturday morning, added that $130 billion in Medicaid cuts to the bill. That is a whopping $930 billion in total Medicaid cuts.
That is how CBO got to this number of 17 million people. The challenge is, nobody marked up a bill in committee. Nobody even had a hearing where somebody presented this information. No, this is all being changed on a daily basis, and everybody is trying to catch up, but what we are really trying to do is fight for our constituents and make sure that we know the impacts.
The impacts of these 17 million people will be severe cuts felt in every corner of the United States. State governments will be the first to feel the tsunami of cuts, and unlike the Federal Government, they must balance their budget, so they can't borrow the money to make up for the deficit.
In our State, the State of Washington, our Governor and legislators have to grapple with an estimated $3 billion shortfall that this will bring to them as a result of this many people losing coverage.
Friday, I held a virtual press conference with a group of Republican State representatives. A Republican Utah State Representative Ray Ward, who just also happens to be a physician, warned that these cuts will amount to $1 billion budget deficit per year in his State of Utah. That budget shortfall forces his State government to make some very difficult decisions. They have to decide whether to cut reimbursements to providers, cut medical services, cut more people off the rolls, or make drastic measures like increasing everyone's taxes.
Kevin Leonard and Steve Hobbs, one of them is the executive director of the Association of County Commissioners of North Carolina and the other a former Missouri representative, basically said, as county government leaders and State leaders, they are worried that this bill basically is an unfunded mandate on them. Commissioner Hobbs said where they will feel it most is that services like behavioral treatment will now have to be provided through the jails instead of a medical setting.
Our own Peninsula Behavioral Health expert, who was on the call, basically said that in their region of our State, this could be as much as a 25-percent to 45-percent cut in behavioral health.
So that is what happens when you cut people off of Medicaid. The amount of money, since $1 in $5 is a Medicaid dollar, you are going to take that much out of the system. These people do not operate on wild, profitable margins, oftentimes barely breaking even, or in behavioral health, oftentimes losing money.
But I guarantee you, if instead of seeing this Medicaid population in a behavioral health setting, you think you are going to see them in the emergency room or a jail, it is going to cost us a lot more money. It is going to cost our State, our county, and the local region a lot more money.
Not only will this bill diminish their Medicaid revenues, but it will also increase the uncompensated care some are estimating to be $42 billion. Our rural hospitals, our rural healthcare challenges will be devastating.
In Washington, over 300,000 people will lose health insurance. And these are people who were easily treatable. Conditions that if you treat them, chances are they will be dealt with. But now, if you don't treat them, they are going to go to the emergency room, and they are going to raise costs on everyone.
These families depend on this care. Last week, I spoke on the floor about one of my constituents. Britton Winterrose talked about his daughter Leda, a 5-year-old girl who had a rare condition where she stops breathing in her sleep if she doesn't have oxygen. Mr. Winterrose talked about how, even though he had a very expensive platinum plan, it didn't cover her costs. And just by doing this Medicaid and covering their cost, basically they have saved her life, and they have enjoyed her, in the many years that they have given to them.
Why are we making the Winterroses sweat over whether their daughter is going to be able to keep Medicaid, about whether the whole system in their part of our State is going to be able to keep doing Medicaid?
Right now, people are estimating that 5.4 million people will get pushed into medical debt because of healthcare and the cuts in this bill, the total amount of medical debt that Americans will owe will increase by $50 billion. So is it really worth it to take $880 billion--or whatever it is now--$930 billion out of Medicaid, so that you are actually increasing the personal debt of people, making counties basically have unsustainable budgets, or having State legislatures come back in to cover our costs? As one of these commissioners said, this is nothing more than cost shifting to the States. It is irresponsible.
According to the Center for American Progress, a 60-year-old couple, who will be in the Affordable Care market today, making $85,000 a year, could see their annual premiums raise as much as $15,400.
Why? Because when you have uncompensated care and you basically kick people out of Medicaid and off of the Affordable Care Act, what you are going to do is raise premiums on all of us.
A low-income Medicare recipient also qualifying for Medicaid could see their costs go up as much as $8,340. So why
And I could just say for a minute about this, when the 2017 tax bill came along and everybody said, the corporate rate is too high. We need to have our companies be competitive around the world. I would have considered lowering that rate to something. In fact, my colleague Senator Kaine from Virginia proposed something. But we didn't accept that. Instead, they lowered it to a very low rate, and then said, this year, we will smidge it back up. That means they will increase it back up a little bit this year. That was their plan.
But somehow, these multinational corporations have got to my colleagues on this side of the aisle and basically said, ``Give us the same rate that we had in 2017.'' Now, the reason I didn't support that in 2017 is because it was kind of ludicrous. You were saying to companies like Microsoft, ``We'll give you a tax break,'' I don't think they really needed that big of a tax break, and ``But by the way, we're going to raise taxes on the people who work at Microsoft. We are going to raise, because of the SALT deduction, we're going to raise your taxes.''
So, literally, hundreds of thousands of people in my State paid higher taxes to do what? Give Microsoft a tax break, which they gave in dividends. Now, did that help our economy? Did that help really grow our economy? I am pretty sure the innovation at Microsoft helped grow our economy. I am pretty sure the people who hustled on AI helped grow our economy. I am sure the investments that we made at Agencies across our Federal Government helped us meet the challenges that we are facing in innovation and competition from China, not that dividend. But now we are doubling up again. And how much is that multinational tax break? Over $200 billion.
So literally, you could take half of that money, and you could give it to Medicaid instead and not cut Medicaid. Now, let's see, tax breaks to Meta and Google or paying for Medicaid? Tax breaks for Facebook and Meta--the same company now changing their name--and Google--or making sure there's enough revenue to pay for Medicaid?
This is ludicrous: the notion that we are continuing to make big corporations the priority when they knew this tax extension was not coming. And I am pretty sure if you look at the numbers that you see from Facebook--Meta--and Google, you will see they don't really need a tax break. They are doing pretty well right now.
So the budget reconciliation bill really threatens our progress on healthcare. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. It is not enough to just say that this healthcare issue that we are really winning the day, when you look at what happened to us in healthcare, when our whole goal of doing the Affordable Care Act was to basically get more people covered under insurance. Why? Because we wanted to lower all the costs on healthcare overall. We wanted healthcare costs to go down, and we wanted the cost of premiums and the cost to individuals to go down and to be more like the rate of inflation: 3 percent to 4 percent. That has been our goal forever--forever.
And so, prior to the Affordable Care Act, rates on an annual basis-- think about this--on an annual basis, your healthcare premiums, your healthcare costs, were generally rising about 5.4 percent a year. OK. Who could keep up with that? Who could keep up with every year your healthcare costs continuing to rise?
And so we did the Affordable Care Act--and guess what? We did get that into the rate of inflation. I think there is more we could have done. Lots of things happened in between, but we literally got it down to 3.7 percent, and we did that by covering more people.
The audacity of my colleagues over here to now claim that Medicaid expenses got too expensive when, in reality, we made this choice to drive down these premium costs, so they were only rising close to inflation, and that was our goal, and we succeeded.
So what are we doing now? Well, under the GOP plan, Wakely Healthcare Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these are numbers that come from them, the GOP plan will now go back to raising your premiums and your healthcare costs between 7 percent and 11 percent a year--a year.
Right? So we are going to go blowing way past the 5.4 percent; we are going to go back here. And why? Because you are going to cut off millions of people from healthcare. You are going to increase the cost of uncompensated care. You are going to make people wait to go to emergency rooms, and then they are going to be sicker, and that is going to cost--I don't know how much it costs, but it is definitely a multiple of five or more.
I don't know if it is--what do you think it is, Kevin, an emergency room? Ten. OK, 10. He says 10. It is 10 times more expensive to deal with somebody at an emergency room than to just get health insurance and get covered.
OK. So now we want to know, why are we raising the cost on everybody's health insurance, including these plans because this side of the aisle basically wants to cut a bunch of people out of a system that lowered the cost of healthcare plans overall and kept it more in the rate of inflation? Why? Why would you want to do this?
So it makes no sense, and I hope our colleagues will think long and hard about that. I also think that you could still take the Google, Meta tax break for multinationals and pay for $100 billion and cover the Medicaid.
You could take another $100 billion from that big tax break, and you could pay for some of the energy tax credits that were so essential to combating the Chinese in what they are doing on the clean energy front. The Chinese firms are doing everything they can to invest and undercut the United States in EV and battery technology. The U.S. is responding aggressively to that. That is why we did the Inflation Reduction Act.
In fact, because of the Inflation Reduction Act, we basically enacted more than 2,000 new clean energy industrial manufacturing facilities, more than 980,000 private sector jobs, and more than 3.4 million Americans claimed clean energy tax credits that improve their efficiencies. In fact, the Joint Economic Committee estimated that the typical household could save between $460 and $1,000 in annual energy costs thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.
But what do we have now? We have President Trump and inflation. We have inflation because of multiple issues, consumers struggling to keep up amid higher prices, mounting debt and fiscal uncertainty. That is what we have.
And so we are reversing the very tax credits that help lower the cost and were going to help us be competitive against China and help us succeed as a nation. And the one thing that I always think the United States is really great at, and that is innovation. I don't know if it just started with Ben Franklin or many other people along the way, but you give Americans the task, and they will do the job. If you give them the education, if you give them the R&D with a university partner, they will get the job done.
And so now, don't take my word for it. Take Mr. Musk's word for it: ``The latest Senate draft bill [will destroy] millions of jobs in America and causes immense strategic harm to our country. Utterly insane, destructive. It gives handouts to the industries of the past while severely damaging the industries of the future.''
Yeah, he said it best.
But back to that chart. We were doing the energy because we wanted to diversify, but we also wanted to lower costs, and we wanted to be competitive. Right here, it says the vehicle, vehicle, vehicle, OK? Natural gas, propane. OK. That is why we were diversifying--because all those things are going up.
So this bill is not going to help electricity. You are getting rid of the electricity tax credit. So again, instead of helping Meta and helping Google, you could be helping to lower the inflationary cost by making the investments in these tax credits.
But, Mr. President, there is more in this bill that I don't like. My colleague from Texas is proposing an AI moratorium. He literally wants to stop States
Well, I know what the Heritage Foundation said. The Heritage Foundation said that the Federal AI power grab could end State protection for kids and workers. Again, you are giving States a big fat bill, and now, you are trying to override laws that have been on the books for a long time, protecting consumers from fraud, from abuse, and they are there to protect kids, and now, you want to get rid of them. So it is no surprise that stakeholders on the right and left opposed this in the bill--they include 17 Republican Governors and 40 attorneys general from both Democrats and Republicans, and other organizations ranging from the Heritage Foundation to the Center for American Progress.
So anytime you can get the Center for American Progress and the Heritage Foundation on the same side of an issue, chances are you should be listening to what they have to say.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this letter from the National Association of Attorneys General.
Mr. President, this bill would affect hundreds--I am quoting now from this letter: ``This bill will affect hundreds of existing and pending state laws passed and considered by both Republican and Democratic state legislatures. Some existing laws have been on the books for many years.''
So these are attorneys general from a variety of States who basically know the laws on their books, and they are basically saying, Don't do this to us. Don't ever override our laws.
Mr. President, I would also like to ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from 17 Republican Governors also against this provision.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Mr. President, their letter I would like to read from is really about this point I was trying to make about fighting China. I mean, I thought we were here to be competitive against them, to basically beat them in a race on innovation, just like we did with CHIPS and Science to try to move for the future.
But basically their letter says:
So they are basically saying the States are on the frontlines of helping to protect on AI.
Now, Mr. President, I have no idea why the President of the United States has not protected the American people or the American military from the Chinese scams that are happening on TikTok. We would never let China own ABC News and put out Chinese Communist propaganda on ABC News, but we let them do that on TikTok.
This body and our colleagues said, No, stop that, and stop the Chinese. And yet we still haven't stopped the Chinese. So now, here we are in this bill cutting out the States' abilities to fight Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek or Alibaba--and they have no interest in stopping the scammers from using their AI products to harm Americans. They have none.
And if you think we are going to pass something here, I am always ready to sign up to get legislation done, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon. And so now you are telling these Governors, these attorneys general, yep, I am not even going to let you fight China because I am going to take that tool away from you. So clearly, I don't support this part of the legislation, and I appreciate my colleague from Tennessee and her attorney general working on this very important issue.
And finally, I come to the issue of spectrum. This is a very ill- conceived plan to auction off our precious spectrum. Such an auction will fundamentally compromise our defense capabilities, while endangering aviation and important Federal capabilities like weather forecasting and scientific research. This bill would require an auction of 800 megahertz of spectrum critical to our military and civilian infrastructure. It would compromise military radio frequencies and weather and other spectrum issues, most importantly, drone operations. And I know the Presiding Officer knows how much drones are now at the epicenter and forefront of warfare and is reshaping the battlefields across the globe. So why would we do this?
Well, my colleague Senator Cruz is pushing for something that experts say would risk military operations. Last Congress, we got the Department of Defense and the Department of Commerce to agree that we should testbed the next generation of technology because we don't like interference.
Now, I am sure most Americans sitting at home are thinking, What is she talking about? Well, if you drive in a car and you have a radio station and, all of a sudden, the radio station doesn't get its signal or has some interference, you know that there is an issue. The tower-- not big enough, not strong enough--this is the same.
This radio spectrum has been used by Department of Defense for secure purposes, very important secure purposes. Mr. President, think of the Chinese balloon and the fact that we want to detect when a Chinese balloon is flying through our airspace. We want to be able to stop people from spying on the United States of America. And yet, instead of basically saying we are going to look at this military spectrum and make sure that it continues to be secure, my colleague is suggesting to all of us that we sell that and basically allow, I believe, for what is going to be a good amount of interference without solving this problem first.
Why does that bother me? Because I think we live in a world where you are going to see more and more spectrum, more and more warfare based on satellite and communication, and the landscape is changing. So I certainly don't want our military preparedness to be affected.
Air Force leaders warned that spectrum bands are crucial to this radar operations, and I am not going to go into more about why, but I am just saying, just like you can't have four radio stations basically interfering with each other, my colleagues want to allow the major telcos, mostly AT&T and Verizon, who are so hungry to sell more, whatever it is, $79.99 plans or $59.99 plans, they literally are going to give away national security just so they can sell more telephone plans.
In fact, I would ask them, what have you done to clean up the last disaster that you had when the Chinese hacked you on Salt Typhoon? Now, they didn't successfully hack the telecom company in my State because they were smart enough to do all the preparatory work not to be hacked. But these guys didn't do the work, and now, they are up here pushing our colleagues to say, give us more, give us more, give us more, without doing the homework required to figure out how to make sure our military is protected.
But what is even more infuriating is they want the same spectrum from our airlines as well. They want to cause confusion between the spectrum of aviation and in this telecommunication. Last time the Trump administration did this, there was a major, major debate, and the White House and the Biden administration had to come in and fix it.
It is all related to the altimeter on a plane. Again, the Presiding Officer
But instead of figuring this out, working together--both commercial and defense--we are jamming into a bill the overriding of the defense interests and saying, just give it to these two commercial bidders, maybe more, who then will basically just feel empowered to sell more of these telco plans.
Mr. President, our competitiveness is too important. Our effectiveness is too important. Collaboration and working together to solve these problems is how the United States is going to succeed. Basically trying to pit each other against each other in these kind of technology issues is not going to help us win.
I have outlined many issues here, and I have outlined how you could fund Medicaid without basically doing what we are doing here. There is no reason, according to the Penn Wharton budget model and analysis, families in the first 40 percent of earners are, on average, projected to experience losses in aftertax income and benefit transfers.
In other words, yes, extending the 2017 tax cuts does help some middle class families, and we would support that, but all the hits in other areas like health insurance mean they will actually lose money overall. The lowest 20 percent of income brackets are hit even harder. So in this massive bill, it is those who can least afford it who are going to be hit the hardest.
We don't need the Trump inflation. We need to protect healthcare. We need to make progress in America's competitiveness. But this is not the answer, and I encourage my colleagues to vote against it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, President Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill, now on the floor of the Senate, is the most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country. It is a gift to the billionaire class, while causing massive pain to low-income and working-class Americans. Actually, though, I am wrong. This is not a gift to the billionaire class. They paid for it.
This bill is an absolute reflection of a corrupt campaign finance system which allows billionaires to buy elections. And when billionaires spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to elect a President or a Senator or a Member of Congress, they are not making that investment just for the fun of it; they want something in return. And this legislation--big time--is what they are getting in return.
So what is in this bill that they invested in? Well, if you are in the top 1 percent, you and the class you represent will receive a $975 billion tax break--$975 billion tax break, at a time when the richest people in this country have never, ever had it so good.
Further--this is really quite unbelievable--if you are among the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent--I am not talking about 1 percent; I am talking about the top two-tenths of 1 percent--you will be able to pay zero taxes on your $30 million inheritance.
So all of you folks out there who are waiting to inherit at least $30 million, today is a good day for you. Collectively, you will receive approximately $211 billion in tax breaks for the top two-tenths of 1 percent. Congratulations, you hit the jackpot.
If you are a large corporation and you want to throw workers out on the street and replace them with artificial intelligence, or maybe you want to shift your profits to the Cayman Islands or other tax havens, you are going to get a $918 billion tax break. Congratulations to the CEOs of large, profitable corporations.
While the rich and large corporations make out like bandits in this bill, what does it do for low-income and working families? Well, let me say a few words on that.
If you are concerned about healthcare, which I suspect that everybody in the world is, this bill throws over 16 million people off the health insurance they have--according to the Congressional Budget Office--by cutting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by over $1.1 trillion. In other words, the top 1 percent are getting a $975 billion tax break, and that is coming directly by throwing 16 million people off of the health insurance they have.
This bill, for the first time, forces millions of Medicaid recipients, who make as little as $16,000 a year, to pay a $35 copayment every time they visit a doctor's office.
So what is the impact of all of that? You throw 16 million off healthcare, you force people who don't have any money to pay a $35 copayment, so what is the impact of it? This is not my view. This is what the Yale School of Public Health and University of Pennsylvania determined based on a study that they did. This is the result--and it is almost so horrific, so grotesque that it is difficult to speak about, but they estimate that if this bill goes through with all of these cuts in healthcare, if 16 million people are thrown off the insurance they have, over 50,000 Americans will die unnecessarily every year--50,000 Americans will die unnecessarily in order to give tax breaks to billionaires who don't need them. In other words, this bill is literally a death sentence for low-income and working-class people.
Further, if this legislation is enacted, rural hospitals all over the country--and I come from one of the most rural States in America. Rural hospitals are already struggling. But when you make massive cuts to Medicaid, many of them are going to shut down or not be able to provide the level of services they do today. In other words, this bill would be a disaster for rural America.
It would also make massive cuts to community health centers and nursing homes, which are very heavily dependent upon Medicaid funding.
The bottom line is that this legislation is the most significant attack on the healthcare needs of the American people in our country's history.
We already have, as everybody knows, a healthcare system which is broken, which is dysfunctional. And instead of addressing it, instead of doing what every other major country I know does--guarantee healthcare to all people--we are throwing 16 million people off the health insurance that they have.
But it is not just healthcare. The future of America rests with our children, and yet in a nation which now has the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth, this bill wipes out nutrition assistance for millions of hungry kids in America.
We are literally taking food out of the mouths of hungry kids to give tax breaks to Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk and Mr. Zuckerberg and the other multibillionaires.
If we understand that if we are going to compete effectively in the global economy we need to have the best education system in the world, this bill makes $350 billion in cuts in education, with the result that working-class kids will find it much harder to get the higher education they need to succeed in life.
If you are concerned about the existential threat of climate change-- and we are seeing heat waves right now all over the world--this bill decimates investments in energy efficiency and sustainable energy like wind and solar and moves us in exactly the wrong direction with regard to energy.
If you are concerned about our role in never-ending wars, this bill makes a bad situation even worse by handing out another $150 billion to the Pentagon, a 15-percent increase in an already bloated Pentagon budget. We don't have enough money to feed hungry children. We don't have enough money to make sure that people continue to have the healthcare that they need. We don't have enough money to make sure the kids can get a decent education. But somehow the military-industrial complex is going to get another $150 billion, a 15-percent increase.
In my view, nobody in the Senate or the House should vote for this legislation, and I applaud all of the Democrats for voting against it. And I want to congratulate two Republicans, Senator Paul and Senator Tillis, for voting against it--for different reasons, by
So it appears now that the Republican Party has really become a party of the cult of the individual. The only thing you have to do now, as a Republican, is say: I agree with President Trump. I love President Trump. President Trump is right all of the time.
Hey, that is all you have to do now to be a good Republican.
There was a day when Republicans and Democrats understood that they were elected by their constituents. Yes, you want to work with the President of your own party; nothing to do about that. But there was an understanding that you were also elected to represent your constituents and not simply pay homage and bow down to every wish and whim of the President.
During the vote-arama, I will be offering several amendments, which I hope will win support. No. 1, at a time when 22 percent of our Nation's seniors are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year, my first amendment would fundamentally improve their lives in two significant ways. No. 1, it would cut the price of prescription drugs under Medicare in half by making sure that our Nation's seniors do not pay any more than Europeans or Canadians pay for the same exact drugs; and, No. 2, with those savings, we are going to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing. In other words, instead of throwing people off of healthcare, we are going to expand Medicare to provide a number of services that seniors desperately need and want.
Secondly, at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, my second amendment would eliminate the $211 billion estate tax for the top two-tenths of 1 percent that is included in this bill. The top 2 percent, as I mentioned, get a $211 billion tax break. That is insane. We are going to get rid of that.
And lastly, at a time when we spend more on the military than the next nine nations combined, at a time when the Pentagon cannot account for trillions of dollars in assets, we are going to end the provision that allows the Pentagon to receive another $150 billion.
The bottom line is this country faces many crises: the high rate of childhood poverty, kids going hungry, the education system in deep trouble, the healthcare system completely broken. And in virtually every single area, this bill takes us in precisely the wrong direction.
When the wealthiest people in this country have never ever had it so good, it is totally insane to be offering them a trillion dollars in tax breaks so that we can cut healthcare, education, and nutrition.
This bill is not what the American people want, and I hope very much we can defeat it.
Thank you very much, Mr. President.
(Disturbance in the Visitors' Galleries.)
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Sergeant at Arms will restore order in the Gallery.
The Democratic leader.
Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for coming to the floor all day today. I thank them for speaking so fiercely and so clearly about what is at stake for the country. And the American people deserve to see this debate. That is why we, last night, forced a reading of the bill.
Republicans don't want people to know what is in the bill. They want to hide it. They know it is not popular. We all know it is not popular. We all know it is totally against what people want. But a small cabal of very wealthy people and hard MAGA people run that show, to the detriment of the party itself and, of course, the American people.
So we forced a reading of the bill last night and allowed people to catch up because the bill was just put on the floor right before the reading started--the amended bill.
So we are here today to continue to shine a light on how bad this bill is, and this debate will continue. Soon, we will turn to vote- arama and bring amendment after amendment after amendment to the floor so Republicans can defend their billionaire tax cuts, so they can try to explain their massive cuts to Medicaid to people back home--why kids who need healthcare shouldn't get it so there can be tax breaks for billionaires; why middle-class families who have someone in a nursing home who is now going to be removed from that nursing home because it is going to close, what they are going to do; and to try and sell to parents and kids why they are making unprecedented cuts to SNAP.
Taking food from hungry babies for a tax cut for wealthy people. What kind of world do these Republicans live in? It is a slanted world. It is really a corrupt world. Kids will get $5 a day to feed themselves. You can't buy a dozen eggs for $5.
And then they are killing millions of good-paying jobs. It is estimated--and, by the way, the clean energy cuts are even worse. Before this, it was estimated 850,000 jobs would be lost in America on clean energy alone, over a million jobs in healthcare. So 2 million jobs, approximately, lost--at least 2 million lost--because of this bill. That could create a recession.
So this has been a long few days in the Senate, but the hardest choices for Republicans are still in front of them because we know that so many of our colleagues on the other side aren't happy with this bill. Tillis is not an exception. There are many others who think the same way he does. Well, they ought to vote their principles, their conscience, and what is good for their constituencies.
Our side is going to give our Republican colleagues a chance to do the right thing in front of this Chamber and in front of this Nation. The American people deserve to know exactly--exactly--what is happening right now in the U.S. Senate because, right now, Republicans are concocting the ultimate rush job. They are trying to pull off a sneak attack on this Chamber and on the American people themselves.
The bill before the Senate is utter poison. Some Republicans are trying to rush through a bill that they released less than 2 days ago, under the cloak of darkness, written behind closed doors, molded in order to appease Donald Trump and the very special powerful interests.
Earlier today, my colleague from South Carolina came to the floor with a pretty interesting looking floor chart, where he claimed that his bill somehow reduced the debt by $500 billion. What a joke. The Budget chair, respectfully, needs to check his math because somehow Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Budget Committee, said that his bill reduces the debt by $500 billion.
The Budget chair, respectfully, check your math, Chairman Graham, because not 1 hour ago, the JCT confirmed this bill does not reduce the debt; it explodes it. It explodes it. That is what it does.
Here is what his chart should have looked like: $4.45 trillion deficit explosion.
According to the JCT, the Republican bill explodes the debt by $4.5 trillion, as this chart, drawn slightly better than Lindsey's, shows.
For those keeping score at home, my colleague got his math wrong by a whopping $4 trillion. All this--all this--just so billionaires are rewarded while millions lose their healthcare, a $4.5 trillion deficit explosion.
And that is not just an abstract concept. What does that mean? The average American will pay more to buy a home. The average American will pay more to buy a car. The average American will pay more on their credit card debt--on issue, after issue, after issue. Prices will go up because of this deficit because of taxes for the billionaires. That is $4.45 trillion, all so some people--wealthy people--God bless them. They made a lot of money. OK. They don't need a tax break.
Let it be known that this bill is the death knell of the supposed party of fiscal responsibility. We always knew that this was a sham, and now this bill ends the charade of Republicans caring about the debt for all time coming. When they say they have to cut healthcare on any bill or food stamps on any bill because it reduces the deficit, we will know it is utter hogwash
So Republicans want to move quickly. That is why we are here on the weekend. That is why they released a bill in the dead of the night--all because they want to hide the truth from the American people.
You know, it is hard to believe, my colleagues; this bill is worse-- even worse--than any draft we have seen thus far. Every time the bill comes to the floor--a new bill, a new amendment--the hard-right handful over on the Republican side: We are not voting for it unless you hurt kids more, you hurt people who need healthcare more, you hurt rural hospitals more, you hurt clean energy more.
And the Republican leadership folds and does it. And the handful of more mainstream Republicans who know how bad this is right now haven't had the backbone to oppose those changes. We hope they find it.
So this bill is worse on healthcare, worse on SNAP. It will kill 900,000 good-paying jobs in clean energy. Folks, you don't like paying your electricity bills, you will pay 10 percent more on your electric bills because of this ``Big Ugly Betrayal.''
It will also kill a million healthcare jobs. You put it all together, and there is no other way to put it; at the very last minute, Senate Republicans made the bill more extreme to cater to the radicals in the House and the Senate. Republicans want to hide the truth so badly, in fact, that they are even ready to blow up the Senate rules to get it done.
Senate Republicans are doing something that has never been done before in this Chamber--never, by Democrats or Republicans--using fake math and budgetary hocus-pocus to make it seem like a gargantuan tax break for billionaires is going to cost virtually nothing. That is insane. It is delusional.
Current policy baseline doesn't take into account that actual budget numbers show these cuts expiring. So when you put them back up again, the deficit increases. It is simple math--second grade math.
But our colleagues just--again, in a frenzy to help the billionaires--are willing even to do that. Republicans know it. That is why they are squirming. You can see sort of the faces come on the floor. They don't look very happy because they know how bad this stuff is.
They can use whatever budgetary gimmicks they want. Republicans can use whatever budgetary gimmicks they want to make their math work on paper, but you can't paper over the real consequences of adding trillions and trillions to the debt in one fell swoop.
CBO, nonpartisan--everyone who looks at this says it is going to increase the deficit. Not the so-called party of deficit hawks. That is out the window.
So what is going to happen when they pass this bill, if they do--hope they don't--our children and grandchildren are going to be faced with a lifetime of higher borrowing costs. As I said, mortgage costs, costs to buy a car, costs for a credit card, harder to start a business--every one of these will get worse.
And the economic ceiling of this country will close in on itself. The American engine that has been the driver of American innovation and growth and optimism for so many generations will sputter and ossify with this $4.45 trillion deficit explosion.
It is deeply irresponsible to future generations, to our children, to our grandchildren to pass this bill. That is not just Members on this side of the aisle saying it. Independent experts across the political spectrum--many of them very conservative Republicans but who are, at least, honest about what they are doing--say it too. And plenty of Republicans in both the House and Senate say it.
It remains to be seen if their words and their actions will align.
The question has to be asked: Why is this even happening? Why is this nightmare of a bill moving forward? Why are Republicans forcing our country down this ruinous road when they know the fiscal harms, when they know this is a rush job?
Well, we know by now: tax cuts to billionaires and corporate special interests. And not just another round but, in fact, they make them permanent.
Our children and our grandchildren are going to be saddled with these cuts so that a handful of billionaires get a big break while working people lose their Medicaid, while hungry kids lose access to food funding, while clean energy jobs that support so many Republican communities are taken away.
I say to my Republican friends: When that plant that makes batteries or wind or solar or when a person who is employing hundreds of people to put panels on people's roofs all fold and the people lose their jobs, don't shrug your shoulders and say: I don't know why that happened.
You made it happen with a nasty bill.
It just makes no sense. We need more energy, AI. Everyone says we need more energy. And to take away the cheapest, quickest way to put more electrons on the grid--solar--makes no sense, except we know Donald Trump has an irrational, infantile, mania against clean energy; so they all listen to him. It makes no sense.
This bill is sabotaging America. It is the sabotaging of America. It is antithetical to what the country needs. It is antithetical to what the American people needed last fall. And our Republican colleagues don't even want to tell the American people the truth. That is why Democrats are here on the floor today, sounding the alarm, setting the record straight.
I also must say this: The way this bill is being passed so deeply violates the spirit of the Senate. The majority forgets that this Chamber is unlike any other institution in government. It is meant to facilitate debate, careful consideration, sound judgment, honest numbers.
We are supposed to resist the passions of the radical extreme. We are supposed to hold the line against policies that would devastate our country. We are supposed to resist the gravitational pull of extremists like Donald Trump who gets these little bugaboos in his head and wrecks America because of it. And they all go along.
Senate Republicans are turning their back on the Senate's longstanding tradition of debate deliberation. By rushing this bill, by upending the rule of the Chamber, by engaging in what amounts to accounting magic to hide the cost of their bill, Republicans, simply put, are accelerating the erosion of the Senate to the nth degree.
Senate Republicans are turning their back on what makes this institution great. More importantly, they are turning their back on the people--their own constituents--in their own communities, people struggling to afford going to see a doctor. You have a child with cancer, and you don't have healthcare? How can we put people in that position?
Or families who have to choose between paying for groceries or paying for prescription drug costs or families who are watching their electricity bills going up and up; families who are paying more and more costs--this bill--America, you don't want to pay higher costs? We don't want you to on our side of the aisle. The Republicans are making it happen. You will pay more and more and more.
And about the future, they are not worried about our kids' livelihood. They are not worried that kids won't be able to find good- paying jobs. Families are worried about the future of this country; but the Republicans are not. And they are worried--Americans are worried about the continued radicalization of leaders in government. And here is the shining example.
So the bill is the wrong answer for the American people. By every objective standard, it is deeply irresponsible. It is not only a violation of how the Senate is supposed to work, it is a violation of the promises that Republicans and Donald Trump--when they campaigned-- made to the American people to look after their issues, not those at the very top.
So I implore my Republican colleagues, there is still time. Abandon these terrible policies. We will continue to have this debate in a real way, not jamming it through in the dark of night. My Democratic colleagues and I will continue exposing the truth. And if Republicans go down that road, we will continue to make sure today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, that the American people know exactly what happened here.
I assure my Republican colleagues--I assure them this vote will not be forgotten. Their betrayal will not go unanswered. This bill must not stand.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. President, I thank our leader for setting the record straight.
It is really awful when you hear Republicans come down here and they just don't tell the truth about the bill that they are trying to pass. Maybe that is why they try to pass it in the middle of the night. They think no one will really notice.
All you have to do is look at their faces. They know what they are doing. They know it is unpopular. They know, as Senator Murkowski said, that they are all afraid. But it is time for them to stand up, isn't it?
Yup. Yup.
Mr. President, on Friday I met Vivian. Vivian is an 11-year-old kid from Winston-Salem, NC. Vivian likes school. She likes her friends. She likes reading Harry Potter. She is a lot like any other 11-year-old; but for Vivian, going to school and being with her friends depends on Medicaid because Medicaid covers the cost of her wheelchair, for her therapists, and for her health aide.
Right now, Republicans are trying to rip away healthcare from kids like Vivian. The cruelty is truly breathtaking.
I asked for one Republican Senator--just one Republican Senator--who plans to vote for this bill to look into Vivi's eyes and tell her that her healthcare is just not a priority for this country.
You know, Mitch McConnell said to Republican Senators that he knew they were getting calls about Medicaid but not to worry about people losing their care because, according to Mitch McConnell, ``they will get over it.''
So I ask the Republican Senators to look at Vivi and Vivi's sisters and Vivi's mom and Vivi's dad and say--if Vivi loses her Medicaid and her wheelchair and her therapists and her health aide, tell all of them that they will get over it, because here is the deal: Vivi won't get over it. Her family won't get over it. The people of North Carolina won't get over it. None of us--Massachusetts, Idaho, Louisiana--none of us will get over it.
The cruelty here is off the charts, but the part that really burns is the Republicans are trying to slash the healthcare that keeps kids like Vivi alive so they can hand out more tax cuts for billionaires. It is beyond cruel. It is obscene.
I am angry, and we should all be angry, because instead of playing at the pool or at the park like a regular kid on summer break, Vivian had to come here to Washington to beg Senators not to cut her healthcare. In a country as rich as ours, that shouldn't even be a question.
Now, I actually don't think that my Republican colleagues have lost their hearts. They have lost their spines. It seems that all they can do now is bow down to Donald Trump and his billionaire donors. They will bow down even if it means hurting families, community hospitals, and nursing homes in their own States.
Trump wants the Republicans in Congress to hand out giant checks to the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations, and the Republican Senators are willing to do that even if it means kicking Vivi to the curb.
Republicans know what they are doing. They know that this bill will hurt people. They know that this bill will kill people. And though it is hard to believe, they just look the other way. But on behalf of Vivi and millions of other kids and mommas and seniors and families that rely on the lifesaving care that Medicaid makes possible, my Republican colleagues should grow a spine and stop this awful bill in its tracks.
If it wasn't bad enough that this bill is set to rip away healthcare from 17 million Americans to pay for tax giveaways for billionaires, it actually has a bunch of other filthy giveaways buried in it too.
Who wins if Republicans pass this ``Big Ugly Bill''? Billionaires; Wall Street; Big Tech; Big Oil; the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations.
Big Oil will get a special ``get out of paying your taxes'' card while millions of people lose their healthcare coverage. Billions of dollars for Big Oil, nothing for Vivi.
Meta--oh, man, Meta. There is a company that is really struggling. Meta will win $15 billion to incentivize them to do research in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Think about that. Unless a time machine comes with this, what Meta does in those 3 years is already done, but under this bill, Meta gets a $15 billion check on the day this bill passes simply for existing, while families lose access to their healthcare.
Wall Street wins big with a provision Republicans squeezed in that would slash funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Giant corporations want the opportunity to cheat American families again, so Republicans are desperately trying to take the cop off the beat.
And who loses thanks to this big, ugly bill? Americans who can't afford healthcare. Families who need a little extra help putting food on the table. Grandmas and grandpas in nursing homes. Little babies and their mommas.
If Republicans pass this bill, 17 million Americans will have their healthcare ripped away. That number has kept growing as the Republicans keep making more and more changes to the bill. For them, it is just a question of how many more Americans they can rip healthcare away from. This bill would also make the biggest cut to food assistance for families, kids, and veterans in American history.
Here is one to underscore: One out of every four nursing homes in America would have to shut down under this bill.
You know, my Republican colleagues should just call a few seniors who are in nursing homes in their home States and just go over the plans for where those folks are supposed to go next. What exactly do the Republicans have in mind for them? Maybe call the daughter of someone who is in one of those nursing homes and explain how she has to become a full-time caregiver once this bill passes. Maybe call just a few of the people whose lives you plan to tear apart.
Budgets are about our values, and Republicans have made their values clear: They are willing to throw millions of Americans under the bus so that they can help out a handful of their billionaire buddies and giant corporations. They should be ashamed.
Here is what Democrats believe. Democrats believe that no baby should go hungry so that Mark Zuckerberg can buy another Hawaiian island. Democrats believe that no person with a disability who needs a wheelchair or a home health aide to live independently should have to give that up so that Jeff Bezos can buy a third yacht. Democrats believe that no grandma should be pushed out of her nursing home so that Elon Musk can take a subsidized rocket ship ride to Mars.
It doesn't have to be this way. What if, instead of tax breaks for billionaires, we make the rich pay their fair share? What if, instead of slashing healthcare for our kids, we make it possible for every American to see a doctor when they are sick without breaking the bank? And what if, instead of giving Big Oil more giant handouts, we make universal childcare a reality for families all across this country?
We can tax the rich. Dammit, if Jeff Bezos can afford to rent Venice for $50 million for his wedding, he can afford to pitch in his fair share on taxes so the next kid has a chance to make it big and the kid after that and the kid after that.
We can make life better for working people. We can make it easier, not harder. We can lower costs for families, not jack them up even more like this bill does. We can put families first, not billionaires and billionaire corporations.
Democrats believe this. Democrats are willing to fight for this. We will vote no on this awful bill. And for kids like Vivian, for seniors in nursing homes, for families who rely on home health aides, and for the millions more Americans that this bill will hurt, I urge my Republican colleagues to grow a spine and vote no.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, before she leaves the floor, I want to thank my colleague, in particular for putting a human face on what this is all about for us on this side of the aisle--that small child, the senior you were talking about. I am going to pick up on what you said, and I thank you for your leadership.
I am going to get into the specifics of this horrifying bill, in a moment--all the details, the healthcare carnage, and the clean energy bloodbath that Republicans are dragging America toward. First, though, I want to spend just a few minutes on the state of the Senate and our democracy.
As of a few hours ago, the rules of the Senate are whatever Republicans feel like when the day begins. It is democracy-defying, plain and simple.
The bill before the Senate is loaded--loaded--with fraudulent budget math that hides trillions of dollars in handouts to corporations and the ultrawealthy. It is a violation of the rules that used to be followed for years for the reconciliation process. It is a violation of the Congressional Budget Act. It is a violation of common sense. Republicans decided that none of that matters. So they have kind of gone nuclear to advance the bill.
Apparently, in this Chamber, if the Republican chair of the Budget Committee says so, one plus one equals three. That is unsustainable. We are going to be a sicker, poorer, and weaker country if this bill becomes law, and the Republicans have used this process, going nuclear, to pass it.
But these moves cut both ways, and there will be a lot of cleanup for Democrats to handle down the road.
Now, in my time in public service, I have never seen a more destructive, regressive, commonsense-defying bill debated in the Senate. This bill is going to determine the future of healthcare in America. Millions of Americans will lose their health insurance if Republicans pass the bill.
My colleagues seem to be ignoring, for example, the fact that rural hospitals are the anchor of life in much of America. This bill will sever that anchor and set rural healthcare adrift.
Here is how flawed the Republican plan is. The danger they are causing for rural hospitals is so great that Republicans have had to create a rural hospital relief fund. It is a bandaid on an amputation.
I can tell you, one thing I know for sure is that only in Washington, DC, would you create a relief fund to address a problem that you caused. How about you just not cut $1 trillion from Medicaid in the first place?
Now, I wanted to get a sense of what rural America thought of this legislation. So last weekend, I held four townhalls in three Eastern Oregon counties. It is as rural as it gets. Donald Trump carried these counties overwhelmingly. One of them was Malheur County, where Donald Trump received more than 70 percent of the vote. This is where I held an open-to-all townhall meeting. It happens to have one of the highest Medicaid enrollments in the country. The message I heard was very clear and very loud: This bill will be a disaster for Malheur County on rural health.
Now, healthcare is a top employer in America. If these cuts go through, the healthcare workforce in rural areas of our Nation is going to be decimated. Nurses, doctors, and support staff will lose their jobs, and rural economies are going to suffer.
Many of the Americans that will feel the consequences of this legislation, today, walk an economic tightrope. Many have multiple jobs.
Millions more Americans will lose their benefits, like home care and mental health, and services that already fall far short of what our people expect. These are overwhelmingly kids, people with disabilities, seniors--all to pay for more tax cuts for multinational corporations and the ultrawealthy.
It is not just the cuts. It is also a whole lot more redtape, making it harder for people to get care.
At the center of the Republican Medicaid changes is a bunch of redtape thickets designed to entrap people into a never-ending maze of AI chatbots and phone trees that make it impossible for them to get the coverage they need.
And even if you manage to get through all that bureaucratic water torture and sign up for Medicaid, the Republican plan says: If you lose your job, you lose your healthcare.
Why would the Congress want to inflict that on more people?
Nobody I could find wants these cuts, no matter their political persuasion, and I was in places that were bright red.
I am sure most of us can agree there is a real debate to be had on how we can make healthcare more affordable and accessible, but this bill achieves none of that.
Let me mention seniors. My colleagues have touched on the elderly. Two in three nursing home beds in America are covered by Medicaid. If Republicans pass this into law, conditions will deteriorate. Seniors will be forced out of their nursing homes or forced to move in with a family that doesn't have the necessary skills to care for their aging parents or grandparents. Nursing homes would be forced to shut their doors as a result of these cuts, during a time when States are in desperate need of more nursing home options, not fewer.
The bill also repeals nursing home safety standards. That is going to mean fewer nurses in nursing homes. You would think that would be a concern of Republicans in the Trump administration.
But when the Finance Committee was considering the nomination of CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, he said:
Dr. Oz was apparently talking about AI, and I said: You are for cutting nurses. What is going to happen when an 85-year-old woman has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and needs some help?
He had no answers. But he is still being a big booster on artificial intelligence.
I am deeply troubled about what the Trump administration has in store for America's seniors. That is on top of the fact that the home-based care that most seniors prefer will be one of the first benefits States are forced to cut because it is optional now rather than mandatory.
Hundreds of thousands of seniors are going to see a premium increase of about $200 a month.
The bill also applies the worst forms of corporate redtape to the Affordable Care Act: shorter enrollment periods, more verification forms, more hoops, more bureaucracy, more redtape for Americans who just want affordable healthcare.
And the healthcare carnage may get worse with the Republican amendments coming up. It is my understanding that they are going to offer an amendment that would lower the Federal Medicaid match for new enrollees in what is known as the Medicaid expansion. That was a key part of the Affordable Care Act, which delivered affordable healthcare to roughly 21 million Americans last year.
If this amendment is adopted, taken together with the other awful policies in the bill, it would amount to repealing the Affordable Care Act and making good on the 15-year Republican crusade to dismantle that law.
Millions more working Americans are going to lose their health insurance, and it would break a promise to the 41 States that have expanded Medicaid, many of them red States.
These healthcare cuts aren't just going to be felt by Americans with Medicaid. Those who buy health insurance on their own are going to be similarly hit. Emergency room wait times are going to skyrocket, and premiums will spike.
Families will be one lost job or financial calamity away from being tossed onto a safety net that has rips and tears everywhere you look. So many are going to fall between the cracks.
I also wanted to touch on another horrendous provision on healthcare buried in the bill: the defunding of the Planned Parenthood program. And they are doing it in a way that is essentially a backdoor, nationwide abortion ban.
This provision is going to strip clinics of their funding and make it impossible for them to provide lifesaving healthcare, cancer screening, and annual exams. All of that will disappear for the people who rely on these clinics for basic care.
The healthcare cuts are getting a big focus with myself and colleagues because of the challenge for so many communities, but there is something else that is absolutely imperative; that is, the clean energy bloodbath, and it certainly deserves attention.
In the middle of the night Friday into Saturday, the bill that was already a disaster for clean energy got much, much, much worse. What Republicans have on offer doesn't just repeal the tax credits I wrote for wind and solar energy in the Finance Committee; now we have an actual massacre on our hands.
This Republican plan actually taxes wind and solar--a new tax on the cheapest and easiest ways to get new energy to the grid. At the same time, somebody tucked into the bill a brand new tax break for coal. So here we are, 2025, and the Senate is about to pass a bill that taxes wind and solar while subsidizing coal. It is so backward, it leaves you slack-jawed.
When you look at this bill, it is awfully clear that the Republican goal is to destroy key sources of clean energy in America. It is a death sentence for the wind and solar industries in our country, a total abandonment of hundreds of thousands of workers who are about to lose their jobs as a direct result of the bill.
The head of the North America's Building Trades Unions that represents millions of construction workers issued a stunning statement on the bill yesterday. I will read a few select lines from the statement. He said it is ``the biggest job-killing bill in the history of the country,'' is how he described the Republican plan; ``staggering and unfathomable job loss;'' a threat to ``an estimated 1.75 million construction [workers].'' This union leader said it was ``the equivalent of terminating 1,000 Keystone XL pipelines'' and that it was ``another lifeline and competitive advantage to China in the race for global energy dominance.'' He also said that ``critical infrastructure projects [will be] `sacrificed at the altar of ideology.'' Those are all direct quotes.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy investments, under the Republican plan, will simply disappear--not government subsidies or handouts; these are private sector investments we will not have. Even worse, this is a guaranteed way to hike utility bills for families and businesses of all sizes in every nook and cranny of America.
I have never seen this kind of economic self-sabotage. The demand for energy booms right now. Even the heads of companies involved in fossil fuels are saying to me and other Members of Congress: We need solar quickly to get more electrons to the grid. But Republicans don't want to listen, because this plan risks plunging us into an energy crisis. It would be a disaster and a total surrender to China on clean energy manufacturing.
It is clear as a sunny day that all the talk from Donald Trump and Republicans about American energy dominance was just a fraud, nothing but a hollow campaign slogan.
I will close with this: There is no question in my mind that the American people went to the polls in 2024 to vote for cheaper groceries, cheaper utilities, and cheaper gas. They didn't vote to kick 16 million people off their healthcare so Republicans can give more tax breaks to billionaires and corporations. They didn't vote for an energy crisis that benefits nobody except Big Oil investors.
There is a real cost-of-living crisis facing American families right now, and this Senate ought to be focused on finding ways to lower drug prices, for example, expand access to quality and affordable healthcare, and bring down the cost of living. Instead, Republicans are using every ounce of their power to jam through another round of tax breaks for those at the very top, and they are doing it on the backs of everybody else.
There are serious challenges ahead, and there is going to be a serious mess to clean up, but until then, countless Americans will needlessly suffer and die as a direct result of losing their healthcare under this legislation.
I don't believe the American people are going to forget, and this side of the aisle will make certain that this topic is something that is dealt with again and again until the American people finally get a fair shake.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
The Presiding Officer is a distinguished businessman. He understands capital flows. He understands investment. There are a lot of people in this Chamber and across the country who, on a nonidealogical basis, want a consistent tax code so that businesses can invest with certainty and predictability.
So let's look at some of the numbers here in terms of the impact of this bill. This bill will kill 300,000 jobs in wind and solar per year. We are going to lose out on $450 billion in capital as thousands of projects go under. And because of that, we are going to generate about 500 gigawatts less energy in the next decade.
Now, there was a time--and I lived through it as a politician--there was a time when people who wanted to take climate action had to argue for that climate action because it is a planetary emergency, and there were tradeoffs. And people on the other side said: Look, as we try to take action to deal with this planetary crisis, we can't create shortages. We can't increase prices. We can't impede economic progress.
All of that has flipped. This bill will create shortages. This bill will impede economic progress. This bill will increase prices.
The 500 gigawatts less energy in the next decade is pretty much exactly the amount of energy that we are going to need to meet rising demand. We are going to have energy shortages as a result of this legislation.
And you don't have to love clean energy or be an environmentalist-- and I love clean energy, and I am an environmentalist. But you don't have to care about the climate. I think you should. You don't have to care about the climate to understand that this is a basic question of supply and demand. Energy demand is soaring for the first time in decades largely--not exclusively but largely--because of AI data centers. And our best chance of meeting it in the next few years is through wind and solar, not oil and gas. Even nuclear and geothermal are going to take a while.
That is not just a political talking point or preference of mine. It is just a fact that gas turbines are stuck in a yearslong backlog. It is also a fact that 80 percent of the new capacity on the grid last year came from solar and storage. It is growing; it is cheap; and it works. And there are hundreds more projects that are in the pipeline waiting to be hooked up.
So the idea that we are going to kill the only energy--the only energy--that can be brought online in the short run the very same week that half the country was melting in a record heat wave which left tens of thousands of people without power is beyond absurd.
Let's talk about how this bill does all of this damage. Specifically, it creates an impossible deadline for projects to be operational in order to claim the clean energy tax credits.
Remember, these clean energy tax credits are Federal law. They are on the books. So when you have a Federal statute, it is not unreasonable as an investor to say: Look, I have got this tax credit. I am going to get x percent back from my initial investment. And you do the pro forma; you do the underwriting; and you figure out that the thing pencils out.
And now what they are saying is that you have got to be operational in 60 days. If anyone has even built a deck in their front yard or tried to do an extension, nothing gets built in 60 days, certainly not a clean energy project.
And it has to be placed in service. What does ``placed in service'' mean? It means not only do you have to have the thing built, you have to have a power purchase agreement through your public service commission or public utilities commission. You have to have a deal in place in the next 60 days after enactment or you get nothing.
So imagine you are a company investing in a solar or battery storage project. You have already put money down. You have secured land and a power purchase agreement, and you are working on permits. And when you started the project, the Tax Code said you could claim a credit to claim the upfront costs. Now, unless you are fully operational, you are out to luck.
On average, a project takes 4 years to go through the full process. So even if you have already started that progress, you now have very, very little time to get it done.
We are going to strand hundreds of billions of dollars in capital. And so the impact on price is going to be crazy. The impact on jobs is going to be crazy. But the impact on America as an investable proposition is the most dangerous part of this.
I don't know that we have ever, through Federal law, made a big subsidy, made a big bet on a certain industry, and then halfway through that process said: Never mind. We didn't mean that. You are stuck.
According to the Edison Electric Institute--and, by the way, I can guarantee you, this is the first and maybe last time I will ever, ever quote the Edison Electric Institute--that will cost people, not companies but people, ratepayers, $60 billion in this decade alone. Your electric bills are about to go up.
A representative of a solar company in Hawaii put it this way:
An owner of a solar company in Montana worried that the credits disappearing would force him to lay off half of his workers.
He says:
A representative of a wind turbine company in Colorado said:
That is the point. Electrons don't have a color. Wanting cheap, abundant energy is not woke. Wanting a liveable planet today and for future generations is not radical. And wanting reliable power and to avoid blackouts and brownouts is not a leftist project.
But even if you set all of that aside for a minute, the States that have benefited the most from these investments are Republican States. According to estimates, nearly three-quarters of clean energy manufacturing facilities are located in Republican States.
It means that Republicans are going to pay more for energy. It means Republicans will lose jobs in clean energy because of a Republican bill. It means Republicans are going to have more blackouts in their homes and businesses.
Gutting clean energy is not somehow owning the libs.
And at least some Republicans in the Senate and House understand that, even if their votes have not manifested to say otherwise.
Here is a letter from 21 House Republicans earlier this year.
And it goes on:
As energy demand continues to skyrocket, any modifications that inhibit our ability to deploy new energy production risk sparking an energy crisis--
``[R]isks sparking an energy crisis.'' Twenty-one House Republicans are worried about an energy crisis imposed by the Republican Congress.
It goes on:
``[W]ould increase utility bills the very next day.''
This is not me, progressive Senator from the State of Hawaii who has made a career out of fighting climate change. This is 21 House Republicans saying: We are going to create a crisis here. Maybe we shouldn't pass this thing. A lot of this stuff benefits us.
If we are all out here talking about ``all of the above,'' why are we cutting off our nose to spite our face? Just because someone wants a talking point? Like, people are literally going to lose their jobs immediately upon enactment. America is going to become a very challenging place to make major investments in immediately upon enactment.
The AI industry may move abroad immediately upon enactment. And prices will go up pretty much right away, as well.
A group of 175 mayors and local leaders wrote:
You know, I grew up to understand Republicans. Look, I didn't grow up as a Republican, but I did understand Republicans were for avoiding unintended consequences. Republicans were against radical change too quickly. Republicans wanted a solid business environment that people could rely upon.
This is literally none of that. This is ideology manifesting itself as energy policy.
And what is going to happen is people are going to lose their jobs and pay tons more for electricity.
The Building Trades Unions called this bill ``the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country.'' And they go on:
I have been here for a while. Keystone XL was a big deal to our friends in labor. I had some very tough conversations with my friends in labor about how important that project was to them and how it was in tension with some of our climate goals. But listen to what they say:
These guys are not me or Jeff Merkley or Eddie Markey or Sheldon Whitehouse or Martin Heinrich or Representative Ocasio-Cortez or any climate advocate. This is the Building Trades Unions. They are saying this is the biggest job killer, perhaps, in American history.
We actually don't have to do this. The impetus behind this bill was essentially border spending and preventing the Trump tax cuts from expiring. And then a bunch of stuff got added on because that is what happens.
We were there for our own version of this--our own BBB, our own Build Back Better--and everybody in your party piles on with something new. Then, the thing becomes a really challenging thing to pass because everybody has their hobbyhorse. And somebody's hobbyhorse is not just to have an all-of-the-above energy strategy, but to go out of your way to kill clean energy.
It doesn't matter that it is going to raise prices. It doesn't matter that it is going to kill jobs. People at all levels in the public and private sectors, across the political spectrum, are all saying the same thing, which is: This is a bad bill for regular people, for the economy, and for the planet.
One of the great things about our climate bill was that it made what was good for the planet also good for the economy. Clean energy became imminently profitable for businesses and widely accessible to consumers. And we made a choice there because some in our party didn't like the basic premise. They were attached to the idea of personal, political, and economic sacrifice because the planet is in peril.
And I understand that instinct. I understand that instinct.
But we paved a new path, and we decided--look--there is enough technology out there. There are abundant energy sources out there that we can actually solve our planetary crisis and create jobs and lower prices. And we can do it in such a way that blue States and red States, urban, rural, suburban all benefit.
Republicans are on the verge of undoing all of that, even though it will hurt their constituents. In doing so, they will virtually guarantee China's dominance in clean energy, for decades to come, because if you are China, you
This is the worst piece of legislation for the planet in the history of our country, and it is not even close. Republicans are effectively codifying Big Oil's wish list into law without exception. They are killing clean energy. They are subsidizing coal. They are dramatically expanding oil and gas leasing. They are purposefully jacking up energy prices and creating shortages--and creating shortages. And for what? Partially, it is to find enough savings to funnel tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars into the pockets of individual billionaires.
But even kicking more than 16 million people off of healthcare coverage, denying food to the poor, and adding almost $5 trillion to the national debt was not enough. People voted for Donald Trump for all sorts of reasons. But no one voted for higher energy bills. No one voted for more frequent blackouts and brownouts and dirtier air or water. No one, whether you are a Democrat or Republican or Independent, wants that.
I want to be clear. This fight is far from over. This fight over this bill is far from over. But even if this bill passes, it will set us back. But the fight for the planet is bigger than any one bill or vote, and that includes the big climate bill that we passed in the previous administration. And as any movement that has successfully mobilized and made changes knows, progress is not linear. Progress always has setbacks and frustrations, and progress is not assured.
States like Hawaii will continue to do everything that they can to protect our environment, and the rest of the world will move on without us because doing nothing in the face of this worsening crisis is simply not an option.
Make no mistake, what Congress is doing today will cost all of us in the years and decades to come.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I rise today--and I will confess, I rise today a bit angry about this bill--this bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers, with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine.
When I first got here, this Chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Our leader, Harry Reid, frequently called me his happiest Senator, such was the awe and wonderment that I felt here.
Today, I feel disgust. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This place feels to me today like a crime scene. Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this Chamber. The midnight transfer of wealth in this bill is disgusting.
There is a backdrop here. The backdrop here is the wealth inequality in our country already, in which the wealthiest 1 percent of our population owns 30 percent of the wealth and the poorest half of our population, together, only own 3 percent of the wealth--the top 1 percent, a third of the wealth; the bottom half of the population by income, 3 percent of the wealth.
And against that backdrop, this bill transfers wealth from middle- class families to giant corporations, billionaires, and megabillionaires. And it transfers wealth from our children and grandchildren to present-day billionaires by adding $5 trillion to the debt limit to run up the debt of the country to fund the tax giveaways to these special interests and wealthy billionaires.
How do they do that? They take away healthcare from 16 million Americans and give huge tax breaks to billionaires.
Most families have someone sit down once a month and go through the bills, and you try to figure out what bills you can pay. You may not pay the whole insurance bill; you may just pay the minimum. You may not pay your whole credit card bill; you may just pay the minimum. You are aware exactly how much money you have because you need to make those payments. That is kitchen-table world.
Billionaire world is different. You have a family office. You never see bills. You don't even know how much money you have, not even to the nearest $100,000. And you don't care because you have more than you could ever spend in your life.
You could pay taxes, like regular people, but there is something about your acquisition of wealth that can't stop. So you won't pay taxes like a normal person. You demand special treatment. You pay less of a tax rate than a firefighter, for God's sake. And that is not enough for you?
Now you come here to this Senate floor wanting even more favors. You already don't know how much money you have. You could pay regular taxes, and it wouldn't take a day from sunning on your private island, a day from cruising in your private yacht, a jet trip on your private jet, a ski trip to your private chalet. Nothing in your life would change if you had to pay taxes like a regular person, but you just don't want to.
And the third is--I should add that, on the tax breaks, a lot of it goes to corporations. This bill doesn't just give big tax breaks to big corporations; it gives big tax breaks to big corporations that move jobs and investment offshore, away from America. And it just doesn't give tax breaks to corporations that move jobs and investment offshore, away from America. It gives tax breaks for doing that. It gives tax breaks for offshoring American jobs and offshoring American investment.
It is the world's worst tax policy. It takes an already-corrupted Tax Code and bends it even further in the favor of megabillionaires and big offshore corporations.
And last, what does this bill do? It causes this transfer of wealth from regular people to the wealthy. It raises your costs to raise their profits.
I am here to talk about one way that happens. Because of this bill, your electric bills will go up. The people behind this bill are counting on you not to know how that works. So I am going to take a minute here, and I am going to tell you how that works.
There are some rules for the grid about how this works. Generators who want to sell power to the grid put in a bid, and they give a price in which they will sell their electricity. You can imagine on this graph that each of these little hash marks is a different generation facility, and each has made a bid at its best price. Once it has the stack of bids, the grid manager, as the load comes onto the grid, dispatches the cheapest generators first and then goes up the stack to the more and more expensive ones. As demand rises, the costs go up. The last one that is called on--the most expensive one that is called on-- sets the price for the whole grid, and this last one, the one that is the price setter on the grid, almost always is a fossil fuel plant, OK? It is almost always a fossil fuel plant.
So, if you look at this graph, you will see here that this measures the price that is charged to put those electrons on the grid for consumers, and this is the energy demand, how much consumers are asking. What does the grid need to supply?
If you look at the top line, this is the world without renewables. This is an all fossil fuel system, let's say, a baseload nuke. OK. Throw that in. As the demand goes up, the prices go up because more and more of these generators have to come online.
Eventually, let's say you get to this point, where you have this much load on the grid and you have this much supply, and the price is set by that generator.
That is the world without clean energy. Now you add clean energy. You add renewables to this equation. What do we know about the renewables? They are almost always cheaper. They are almost never the price setter. So they fill in down here, and they fill in below the price of the fossil fuel plant. So if you have load requirement X and you live in ``fossil fuel only'' world, you are going to be paying that price for energy on the grid--all of it--because it is set by that price setter generator. But if you filled in with renewables, then you are down here for price for that much load. You are saving huge amounts of money. The grid is way more efficient with renewables in the mix.
By the time you get to the same price that you had here for load X, for fossil fuel, you are all the way out
Let's see how clean energy fits in this specific area. Let's look at Texas.
Oh, by the way, last year, 95 percent of the power that came on the grid that filled in here was clean energy. If this bill kills clean energy growth, which is its intention, then it is going to kill off the power source that provided 95 percent of what was added to the grid last year. It is going to be a big, big hit.
So let's look at the Texas grid, which is easy to talk about because it is a stand-alone grid. Somebody just did a study of the Texas grid, and they found that with renewables--and Texas is 30 percent renewables, OK? So we are in the ``with renewable'' situation. With renewables, the average price last August was $39 per megawatt hour. This was $39. Then they calculated what happened if you backed out all the solar that had been added. If it weren't for the solar driving this price down, instead of $39 per megawatt hour, it would have been somewhere between $55 and $90 per megawatt hour--a minimum $25 differential, maybe more than twice the cost.
The punch line:
Without the clean energy growth of that 95 percent of supply that came out of the grid that was clean energy last year, electricity prices would have been 40 percent higher. And where would that 40 percent have gone? It would have gone into the pockets of the fossil fuel industry that was setting that price as everybody had to pay more and more and more.
So when you see the fossil fuel industry come here and take this shot at its clean energy competition in this bill, after having flooded that side with political money, they are going to make a fortune off of this, and consumers--consumers--will pay. That is how this bill robs you. It puts you back onto the fossil fuel side of that curve, not onto the clean energy added part of the curve, which lowers prices so dramatically.
The report concluded:
By the way, while the fossil fuel polluters are out trying to damage their competition by using the power of government and the influence of their dark money operation to do so, they are also damaging America's competitiveness against China.
China has already put in 25 times the solar that we are putting in onto their grid. That gives them huge advantages as they construct solar panels, design solar technologies, and offer that to the rest of the world.
We are in a world market for solar technology just like we are in a world market for electric vehicles. The fossil fuel industry's desire to destroy the American solar market and to destroy the American electric vehicle market is about as unpatriotic as you can get because it is taking these two technologies and saying: Go for it, China. We are out. We are out. Have the entire international market for solar and for energy. We are not going to compete. We are going to load up our people with new taxes. We are going to tear away the subsidies.
By the way, the fossil fuel industry that is telling you this--they are the recipients of the biggest subsidy in world history. They get $700 billion a year in the United States alone from being allowed to pollute for free. It violates market economics to pollute for free. Milton Friedman, the most conservative economist, will tell you it is not proper market theory. When somebody is polluting for free, the cost of the pollution should be in the price of the product.
So they already benefit. The fossil fuel industry already benefits from the biggest subsidy in world history--$700 billion with a ``b''-- $700 billion every single year to compete unfairly against clean energy. On top of that, they want to rip away the investments that have been made, and they want to put a new tax on clean energy, and they want to drive consumer prices back up to their fossil fuel model.
There are some really big losers in this big loser of a bill. For anybody who cares about adding $5 trillion to our national debt, that is a big loss. It comes through in interest rates for people with car loans and home loans. Healthcare--16 million people are getting chucked off their healthcare. Hospitals and nursing homes are facing receiverships as their revenues dry up from a nearly trillion-dollar hit to their revenue streams.
Taxpayers are getting clobbered by an already corrupt Tax Code that this makes even worse, for the individuals benefiting the most from the corruption of the Tax Code and who are the least deserving of our solicitude and who are the most able to pay.
I promise you there are people who will not know they even got this $300,000 individual billionaire benefit. Because they are so rich already, it won't even count.
On the flip side of the coin, if they had to pay taxes like a normal American, they wouldn't even notice that either. They would still be able to sun on their islands, cruise on their yachts, ski at their chalets, and jet on their jets. Yet we are breaking the bank to the tune of $5 trillion to take care of those people--creepy billionaires who can't even count their wealth but for some reason insist on coming to Congress and just seizing even more and looting the public trough.
Offshoring corporations get a special tax benefit for offshoring jobs and investment, moving them away from America. Remember, this was the ``America first'' agenda--but not when you look into the weeds of this crooked bill.
So creepy billionaires, offshoring corporations, and, of course, fossil fuel polluters who want to pollute have got all the money in the world. They have made massive profits. They could do their own carbon removal and make their products safer. They choose not to. They choose not to because they want to pollute, and they want to kill their competition so they can pollute more and profit more and drive up consumer prices, as I showed here.
And guess what. The creepy billionaires, the offshoring corporations, and the fossil fuel polluters--what do they have in common? Huge donors to the Republican Party. That is what this bill is about. It is not about taking care of the economy. It is not about taking care of the public. It is payback to big special interests and billionaires who provide the dark money funding that floats the Republican Party, and now they are demanding payback for the majorities that they bought.
There is a wasp that lays its larvae inside another bug, and the larvae of the wasp inside that other bug are able to take over the nervous system of that other bug. They can take over the command and control system of the bug, and they start driving the bug around from the inside. They make it do what the larvae want it to do. They make it go where the larvae want to be. They make it hang where the larvae want it to hang. And then the larvae consume it from the inside. They eat it, and they turn into the next generation of wasps.
That is a pretty good analogy for what has happened here. Those creepy billionaires, those fossil fuel polluters, those big offshoring corporations have taken over the command and control system of the Republican Party. The bug over there is being marched around by those special interests, doing exactly what it is told. And it doesn't care about the 16 million people coming off insurance, it doesn't care about the added pollution, it doesn't care about the increased costs, it doesn't care about the unfairness, and it doesn't care about making the Tax Code more corrupt because the special interests are in that bug, running that show.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. President, I come today to explain my vote yesterday for voting against the motion to proceed on this bill.
I spent most of my career in management consulting. I managed large, complex enterprise projects, multiyear, thousands of hours, with a lot of complexity that takes people, process, and technology to make them work. I learned a lot in that career, and I was able to go to the legislature and take that mindset as a member of the minority for two terms.
Then we got the majority in 2010, and I found myself being the speaker of the house. We were in the middle of the financial crisis. When I got sworn in in January of 2011, North Carolina had a $2 billion shortfall on a $20 billion general revenue fund, and I had 6 months to balance that budget.
We did something that had not been done in North Carolina. We took the time to understand every aspect and every dollar that was being spent in government. We determined how to cut government in a way that was sustainable. We cut 12 percent from the university system budget, not at the rate of growth but the actual spending.
I had some people say that it was going to be disruptive, and the University of North Carolina would never be the same again. But we did it in a way that was instructed by the operations of the university system. And we did it in a way in concert with the chancellors.
And do you know what happened? We actually balanced the budget. We did do those cuts. And the last time I checked, the North Carolina University system is still considered one of the greatest systems in the United States of America.
Why do I use that example? Because the Medicaid proposal in this bill bears no resemblance to that kind of discipline and due diligence. It has no insights into how these provider tax cuts are going to be absorbed without harming people on Medicare.
Even worse, most of my colleagues do not even understand, on either side of the aisle, the interplay of State-directed payments and the devastating consequences of the funding flows that are going to be before us.
Here is how I figured out the impact in North Carolina: I used to be speaker of the house. And I like the speaker and have a good relationship with the speaker and the President pro tempore, so I called them up. I had my staff ask them if they would do an impact assessment on what this proposed bill would do to the Medicaid Program in North Carolina.
But I didn't want just the view of the Republican partisan staff that report to the speaker and the President pro tempore on how they are going to absorb this bill. I decided to go to Josh Stein, the Governor. I went to his Democrat staff for Medicaid. I asked them to prepare an estimate, independent of the estimate that I had done with fiscal research.
But I took it a step further. I went to the hospital association. I asked three different independent groups--a partisan Democrat group, a partisan Republican group of experts, and a nonpartisan group of the hospital association to develop an impact assessment, independent--not talking, not sharing, reporting to me.
What I found is the best case scenario is about a $26 billion cut. Now, we have got a delay, so it may be 2 years; it may be 1 year. All it does is make that $26 billion happen in year 1 or year 12. But the impact is the same, and it is indisputable.
Now, when I actually presented this report, that you can find on my website, I had people in the administration say: You are all wet. You don't know what you are doing.
I said: Well, why don't we assemble a series of meetings. We are going to provide you our analytics. You go through it. Tear it apart.
And I told Mehmet Oz, whom I consider to be one of the most capable people in the Trump administration--he is a brilliant man. I encourage my Democrat colleagues to talk to him. He knows his stuff, and he is very focused on getting efficiencies out of CMS.
So we had three different conference calls with CMS, with Oz on the video and me on the video. I said this: Guys, I would love nothing more than for you to prove me wrong. I would love nothing more than for you to tell me it is not $26 billion or $30 billion; that it is $2.6 billion or $2 billion or $200 million.
But after three different attempts for them to discredit our estimates, the day before yesterday, they admitted that we were right; that between the State-directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill, there is a reduction of State-directed payments, and then there is the reduction of the provider tax. They can't find a hole in my estimate.
So what they told me is that, yes, it is rough, but North Carolina has used the system; they are going to have to make it work.
All right. So what do I tell 663,000 people in 2 years or 3 years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding is not there anymore, guys?
I think people in the White House, the amateurs advising the President, are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.
Do you know the last time I saw a promise broken around healthcare, with respect to my friends on the other side of the aisle, is when somebody said: If you like your healthcare, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep it.
We found out that wasn't true. That made me the second Republican speaker of the house since the Civil War, ladies and gentlemen, because we betrayed the promise to the American people. Two years later, three years later, it actually made me a U.S. Senator because in 2010, it had just been proposed. And just anticipation of what was going to happen was enough to have a sea change election that swept Republicans into the majority for the second time in 100 years.
Now Republicans are about to make a mistake on healthcare and betraying a promise.
It is inescapable that this bill, in its current form, will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office or in the Cabinet room when I was there with Finance, where he said: We can go after waste, fraud, and abuse on any programs.
Now those amateurs who are advising him--not Dr. Oz; I am talking about White House healthcare experts--refuse to tell him that those instructions that were to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse all of a sudden eliminates a government program that is called the provider tax.
We have morphed a legal construct that admittedly has been abused and should be eliminated into waste, fraud, and abuse.
Money laundering, read the code. Look at how long it has been there. I was speaker of the house. I refused to do it. When I left North Carolina, I said we are not going to do a provider tax. I left it at 2\1/2\ percent. Now it is 6--a mistake on the part of the leadership.
Frankly, I know my friends are probably going to think I am a little bit crazy here, but I actually passed a law that made it illegal to expand Medicaid.
Why did I do that? Because I was convinced someday we would be here. I would have rather found a way to get more people on Medicaid at the standard FMAP than having this 90-10 match and watching it disappear and taking away desperately needed healthcare.
Over the course of the evening, I may look for an opportunity to speak again, but I am telling the President that you have been misinformed. Your supporting the Senate mark will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.
I love the work requirement. I love the other reforms in this bill. They are necessary, and I appreciate the leadership of the House for putting it in there. In fact, I like the work of the House so much that I wouldn't be having to do this speech if we simply started with the House mark.
I have talked with my colleagues in North Carolina. I know that we can do that. And I believe that we can make sure that we do not break the promise of Donald J. Trump that he has made to people who are on Medicaid today.
But what we are doing, because we have got a view on an artificial deadline on July 4 that means nothing but another date in time--we could take the time to get this right if we laid down the House mark of the Medicaid bill and fixed it.
My friend and colleague from New Hampshire, I jumped in front of her, so I am only going to take another minute or two.
But we owe it to the States to do the work to understand how these proposals affect them. How hard is that? I did it. How hard is it? How hard is it to sit down and ask the Medicaid office, ask the legislative staff, ask the independent hospital association what the impact is? If there is no negative impact, what is wrong with daylight? What is wrong with actually understanding what this bill does?
I know what it does because I spent a career implementing complex systems, and then I had the privilege of being speaker of the house, and I implemented a limited government setting. And since I have been here, I have focused on bills and watched their implementation from the cradle until they are fully implemented.
We owe it to the American people and I owe it to the people of North Carolina to withhold my affirmative vote until it is demonstrated to me that we have done our homework; we are going to make sure that we fulfill the promise; and then I can feel good about a bill that I am willing to vote for. But until that time, I will be withholding my vote.
Legislative Session
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate will now resume legislative session.
Mr. President, I also ask indulgence for one more minute.
This is really easy. Yesterday was my 38th wedding anniversary. I have convinced Susan Tillis to stay married to me for 38 years. I wish I was going to be with her and a couple of dozen family members down at the beach, but I am doing my work here, and I am going to stay until it is done.
I also want to wish my grandson--they are celebrating his second birthday today down there at that same beach house--happy birthday.
God bless my family. I love you.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
Mr. President, I am sorry to see my colleague Senator Tillis leave before I have a chance to tell him how much I am going to miss him.
We have worked together on a number of things, including the Senate NATO Observer Group. He has been a great partner, an excellent Senator, and I am sorry to hear that he is not going to be staying in this body.
But, Mr. President, I am really here on this floor to oppose the reconciliation bill that we are considering today. It would be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single bill in our history.
This legislation would take away healthcare for millions of Americans; it would cut food aid for millions more; it would raise household energy and healthcare bills; and it would add trillions to the debt, all to give the top, not just 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent of people who make more than $2.5 million a year an extra $250,000 a year.
At a moment when Americans are struggling with the high cost of living, this bill will take money out of the pockets of working people, the average household making less than $50,000. That is 30 percent of Americans. So 30 percent of Americans will lose about $700 a year from this bill.
Here are some of the ways that it hurts middle-class Americans, the people whom I am very proud to represent in New Hampshire: Somehow, the Senate took the bad bill--or what I thought was a bad bill--from the House, and they have made it much, much worse.
This bill is the largest cut to healthcare in American history. In total, the bill proposes more than $1 trillion--$1 trillion--in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act--$930 billion of that is Medicaid alone. Because of these cuts, more than 300 rural
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 17 million Americans, including 43,000 Granite Staters, would lose their health insurance.
Over the past several weeks, the past couple of months, I have toured New Hampshire. I have heard from countless constituents who are deeply anxious about what this bill means for them and for their families.
Again and again, they have said plainly, without Medicaid, without the Affordable Care Act, they would not be here today.
I heard from Danielle in Dalton, northern New Hampshire. Danielle is a proud mother of three sons, two of whom have autism. Danielle's sons rely on Medicaid for their health coverage and for their home care. Danielle is not only their full-time caregiver; she receives a stipend from Medicaid to provide for their care. And thanks to Medicaid, both of her sons are able to work part-time, they are able to live at home with their mom, and they are able to remain active in the community.
This bill would put all of that at risk. Danielle says her sons could have difficulty qualifying for Medicaid under these new rules, and losing Medicaid would be catastrophic for her family because it would likely force her sons out of work, out of her home, and into a group home or institution. So it is going to cost a lot more if that happens.
Her boys are now contributing members of society, and this bill threatens not only their livelihood and their independence and their future, it threatens their dignity.
I heard from Shawn in Claremont. Shawn shared with me his story of addiction to alcohol, cocaine, and heroin and his long road to recovery. After several near-death experiences, he found stability in a sober living home and enrolled in Medicaid. With access to treatment, he was able to hold a job and get his life back on track.
He eventually opened his own sober living home, Hope 2 Freedom, where he now helps others suffering from addiction so that they can enroll in Medicaid and begin their own journey to sobriety.
I heard from Karla in Exeter. Karla has twin 3-year-old boys, one of whom had serious medical complications at birth. Now, she always was able to have health insurance with her job, but as her family's medical bills piled up, she enrolled her son in Medicaid to ensure that he got the care that her family could not afford and her employer-sponsored health insurance wouldn't pay for. He still needs extensive care to this day, and losing her coverage would put her family into devastating medical debt.
Probably the story I heard that touched me as much as any was from a man in Berlin, in northern New Hampshire. He had had a number of substance misuse issues, mental health challenges.
He said: Without Medicaid, without the center--we were at a center where Medicaid helped pay to support people who needed help. He said: Without this, I would just give up; I would commit suicide because there would be nothing for me.
These are just a handful of the countless stories I have heard these past few months. They are about real people.
This bill isn't just words on a page; it is a direct attack on not only their health and their economic security but their very dignity, their ability to have fulfilling lives and to contribute back to their communities and to society. We owe them better than this.
This bill would also make catastrophic cuts to food assistance that is provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP. During this time of high food prices, of increasing food insecurity, it is particularly critical for families to be able to rely on SNAP to help them keep food on the table.
One of the ways this bill cuts the program is by requiring States to pay higher costs. Now, as the former Governor of New Hampshire, I can tell you how much of a burden this is on our State's budget. And there are all kinds of provisions in this bill that are nothing but massive cost shifts to States, and this is one area.
The bill puts food assistance at risk for families with teenage children as well as older adults, veterans, and individuals experiencing homelessness. In New Hampshire, an estimated 1,000 older adults could lose SNAP access. These cuts will mean increased hunger across the country.
You know, we talk a lot about kitchen table issues here. Passing this bill is an explicit vote to take food off of families' kitchen tables.
I heard from Rachel. She is a care coordinator at a behavioral health center in Claremont, which is in the western part of New Hampshire. She told me:
She goes on to say:
On the energy front, for families concerned about energy costs, this bill only offers more pain. In addition to cutting off tremendously successful incentives for electricity that are adding reliable, affordable, and clean energy to the grid at a record pace, this bill cuts off longstanding tax credits for consumers--for average, everyday Americans--to make energy-saving improvements to their homes or to add rooftop solar to take control of their own energy bills.
After countless promises to lower people's energy bills, this legislation would do just the opposite. Last year, 2.3 million families took advantage of the home energy efficiency tax credit and cut an average $130 off of their yearly energy bills. Now, this may not sound like a lot to the Mar-a-Lago crowd, but it makes a big difference for families in New Hampshire who worry about how they are going to heat their homes. American households are expected to pay an extra $170 billion in energy bills over the next 10 years, thanks to the misplaced priorities in this bill.
Add to that 1.5 million good jobs that are likely to go away, and it makes you wonder if supporters of this bill have actually read it or if they actually care about American energy dominance.
And on taxes, this bill spends more than $4 trillion on tax cuts, including nearly $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the biggest corporations. But for taxpayers earning less than $30,000 a year, they would see an average tax increase.
Let me say that again because I didn't say that quite right with the right emphasis: For taxpayers earning less than $30,000 a year, they would see an average tax increase in 2029. And these are the same families who are going to be harmed most by extreme cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Families making under $50,000 are likely to be worse off, and some could lose more than $1,500 a year under this bill.
So if you add to that the effects of Trump's tariffs, which raise the cost of living for a typical family by $2,000 a year, this makes it even worse for families. So the bottom 80 percent of households, those making less than $175,000, will be worse off, on average, under this bill.
Now, I have talked about how this bill makes families pay more for healthcare, for energy, and food in order to give more money to billionaires, but there are a few other things that people should know. First, because of the trillions of dollars this bill would add to the debt, interest rates are likely to go up. That adds more than $1,000 a year for a typical mortgage.
This bill makes it harder for students to afford the cost of college, and it removes debt protections for students who have been defrauded by their schools.
And this bill actually tries to prohibit States from regulating AI for the next 10 years, making it that much harder to keep our kids safe online and to protect jobs from being lost to the use of this technology.
You know, I was first elected to the New Hampshire State Senate more
This bill makes having a family more expensive by raising the cost of energy, healthcare, and education. This bill takes food and healthcare away from seniors and families, and it does all of that--it does all of that--to give trillions of dollars more to corporations and to the wealthiest. And it explodes our deficit in the process. That is not what the people of New Hampshire are asking for, and it is not what Americans deserve.
So, to my colleagues in the Senate, I say this: At a moment when Americans are feeling squeezed by the cost of living, we should be doing something about that.
Instead of gutting healthcare to pay for tax cuts, we should be expanding access to affordable, quality care.
Instead of turning our backs on working parents, we should be making housing more affordable. And we should ensure that every child has access to high quality, affordable early education.
Instead of cutting nutrition programs, let's make sure that no child in America goes hungry.
Instead of driving up food and energy prices, let's invest in the programs that help American families succeed.
President Trump calls this the Big Beautiful Bill, but it is a big betrayal of the American people. There is nothing beautiful about taking away healthcare and food from working families to give more money to billionaires.
So I intend to vote against this legislation, and I urge all of my colleagues to do the same.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. President, I don't believe you can serve in the U.S. Senate without being, at least, an amateur student of history. You are overwhelmed in this Chamber, which is where the Senate has met since 1859, to reflect on all of the things that have occurred in the past, and you remember your own experience there as well. I certainly do.
This is my 29th year of service in the Senate, and I think back this evening to some of the things which I have witnessed and that still stick with me.
I can still see that door open and Ted Kennedy walk through it, summoned from his deathbed in Massachusetts to cast the deciding vote on the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. He wouldn't miss it, even if it meant he was going to die in the process.
I think of that door over there, when President Trump, in his first term, tried to, basically, eliminate the Affordable Care Act, and it was saved at the last minute, at 2 in the morning, when John McCain came through those doors, stood in the well right by that table through the Republican side, and cast his vote no. He couldn't raise his arm, it had been damaged so badly when he served as a prisoner of war during Vietnam, but you knew how decisive his gesture was. And he saved healthcare for millions of Americans.
There were other moments as well that I can reflect on, but the point I would like to get to is this: There was a speech a few minutes ago on the floor of the U.S. Senate which every Senator should have heard, particularly every Republican Senator.
The Senator from North Carolina gave a speech--Senator Tillis--and explained why he decided to vote against this Republican budget plan, this reconciliation bill. He explained it in a thoughtful and comprehensive and convincing way. But before he made his decision, he turned to Republicans in the State and Democrats and a neutral third party to analyze the bill. He concluded, after that careful study, that this measure, the changes in Medicaid and Medicare and other health programs, would be a disaster for the State of North Carolina.
He had made it clear before tonight that he was going to vote against this bill, and he made it clear this morning that he is preparing to retire from the Senate.
I felt his statement was compelling, and I am sorry that there weren't other Members on the Republican side, at least one beyond the Presiding Officer, present to hear it.
It is seldom that you hear a speech on the floor of the Senate that you know is so personal and so heartfelt and so meaningful as the statement made by Senator Tillis earlier. He made a decision, which will be widely reported, I am sure, and showed a level of political courage which is seldom seen in this Chamber.
He basically said in a positive way that the President was wrong in believing that this wouldn't hurt ordinary people. This Republican measure, which is before us tonight and tomorrow is going to hurt a lot of people.
We estimate that 16 million American families will lose their health insurance as a result of this measure that is on the floor today.
I have said it before, but I want to repeat it. If you have ever been the father of a new baby with a serious medical problem and you have no health insurance, you will never forget that moment as long as you live. I know. I have been there.
I went to the charity ward at Children's Hospital as a student of Georgetown Law School with my wife and baby. We waited in line to see which doctor would walk through the door and see my baby and save her life. You feel that you have let everyone down in the world at that point when you don't have health insurance when you need it so badly. It means so much to you.
This bill is designed to take health insurance away from 11 million families in America. Eleven million families in America in a period of time will not have peace of mind that they have access to the best care because they will have lost their health insurance.
What is it about Donald Trump taking away coverage of healthcare? Why has this become the trademark of the Donald Trump Republican Party? He did it in his first term. He tried to, but John McCain stopped him, and now he is trying to do it again.
The question is whether Senator Tillis and his Republican colleagues can muster enough courage to step up and find four Republican Senators who will say: No. No. I am not going there. I don't want it on my conscious or my record that I took health insurance away from so many American people.
Now, you may argue: Durbin you are a Democrat--and I am--and your arguments have to be tempered because you are so partisan, so political. Surely it isn't as bad as you just said it was.
Well, let me read something to you. It is from a group called the American Cancer Society. I am sure you have heard of it. This is their Cancer Action Network, and it is a letter to the Senate from Lisa Lacasse, president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. Here is what she says about the measure that is pending before us now that we are being asked to vote on. It is from the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network:
She goes on to say:
Then she said:
So if you are skeptical about anything that I say because of my partisan background, I understand. But for goodness' sake, when the American Cancer Society--they have such a definitive statement made that this measure we are being asked to vote on is going to harm innocent people--men, women, and children. That is a fact.
I might add another short message we received from the Children's Hospital Association. Matthew Cook is their president and CEO, and here is what he says about this bill that is pending:
That is from the Children's Hospital Association.
Neither of these organizations is a partisan organization, and they have confirmed what Senator Tillis said earlier on behalf of the State of North Carolina and what those of us on this side of the aisle have been saying all along.
Why would we risk the lives and well-being of so many children, so many American families? What is it about the trillion dollars which we will take out of the healthcare system in America that is so pressing, so demanding that we are willing to make these big risks? I will tell you what it is. It is the extension of tax breaks--tax breaks for the wealthiest people.
Oh, Durbin, you Democrats always talk about billionaires and millionaires. It can't be true.
Senator Angus King is here. He told me that he did an analysis of the actual tax breaks. If I remember correctly, if you do a cut-off of income at $400,000 a year and say anyone over that figure is not going to receive any tax break, you would reduce the cost of this tax program by 60 percent or more--60 percent or more.
So when we talk about tax breaks for the wealthiest people in America, that is exactly what this is about. I want to give tax breaks, if we can, to working families that struggle paycheck to paycheck. For goodness' sake, a $346,000 tax cut for Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth? What are we thinking?
I just want to make quick reference to two States that have an experience coming with this bill, which will be dramatic. One is Kansas. In Kansas, 360,000 individuals rely on Medicaid coverage. Fifty-six percent of them are children. But with this bill, 89,000 people in Kansas are going to lose their health insurance.
In Kansas, Medicaid covers one-third of births and 58 percent of nursing home residents. What happens when Medicaid does not pay enough money to the nursing home to keep your mother in good care or your father or someone in your family? What do you do next? Well, you exhaust the savings that are available to your family. If that isn't enough, what is next? I don't know.
When I grew up, as a kid, there was a spare bedroom in my grandparents' home for brothers and sisters who had no place else to go. I suppose that is going to happen to some families.
Already, 28 rural hospitals in Kansas are at immediate risk of cloture. To think that this measure will have no impact on those families and those communities is just plain wrong.
In the adjoining State of Missouri--I grew up across the river, the Mississippi River; I grew up in Illinois; I grew up across the river from St. Louis, MO--1.2 million individuals rely on Medicaid coverage. Fifty percent are children. With this bill, 250,000 people in Missouri are projected to lose their health insurance. Medicaid covers 40 percent of births in Missouri and 65 percent of nursing home residents.
Already, 10 rural hospitals in Missouri are at immediate risk of closure. Mr. President, you know as well as I do what happens in smalltown America, rural America, when they close the hospital. It is devastating--not just because you don't have access to quality healthcare but because you just lost a major economic engine for that community. Try to attract a new business to that town after the hospital closes. Watch what you run into. It is that devastating.
That is the reality of this approach. And why are we doing it? What is the national energy that calls on us to make this change? Tax breaks for the wealthiest people in the America. That is what is motivating the Republicans now.
I want to close and just say thank you to Senator Tillis. He has shown extraordinary courage. The question is whether others will join him, whether four Republican Senators will step up and say: Enough. I have heard enough. I have seen enough. I believe this is wrong.
There are ways we can help people who need a tax break rather than the wealthiest people that won't damage some of these families. Eleven million, 16 million--whatever the number turns out to be--will lose health insurance.
I hope that we come to our senses and do it soon. I hope what Senator Tillis said on the floor will inspire Members of his own caucus to listen carefully, to know that he speaks the truth and has taken great political risk to say it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. President, I am proud to join my midwestern colleagues today to draw attention to what will happen in our States if this bill were to come to pass. So I rise today on behalf of the 17 million Americans who are poised to have their healthcare terminated because of the Republicans' disastrous budget bill.
While I am laser-focused on the nearly 260,000 Wisconsinites whose healthcare will be placed in jeopardy by this measure, I realize that so many Americans who reside in States that are represented by Republicans don't have a voice in this fight right now on this Senate floor.
You know, I have traveled my State extensively, listening to people talk about how this bill would impact them and their families, and I have shared those stories, I have uplifted those stories, sometimes right here on the Senate floor and sometimes in other ways.
I know that my Republican colleagues are getting the same influx of phone calls and letters that I am getting from parents of children with disabilities, from the elderly and folks who are working hard but just can't keep up. These are constituents who are downright scared that they will have the rug pulled out from under them.
I know my Republican colleagues are hearing from their rural hospitals and their pediatricians who are clear about what this bill will mean for their ability to keep their doors open and to care for their patients.
According to reports, my colleague from Kentucky even admitted as much behind closed doors last week, saying that ``I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid.'' But rather than committing to join us in this fight, he said ``They'll get over it'' and urged his colleagues to forge ahead with this bill.
Well, if my Republican colleagues won't fight for these Americans, I think it is well past time that some of us do. That is why I am proud to be standing with my midwestern Democratic colleagues to do and say something about it.
I am here to stand up for the over half a million midwestern Americans in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and the Dakotas whose healthcare is on the chopping block if Republicans jam through this terrible budget bill.
In just those 6 States alone, over 340,000 Americans will lose their Affordable Care Act coverage, and over 225,000 Americans will be kicked off Medicaid if the Republicans get their bill and their way. In Iowa, over 100,000 Americans' care could be on the chopping block, including over 58,000 Americans whose families rely on Medicaid.
When we talk about hundreds of thousands of people losing healthcare coverage, it can sometimes get lost that this actually means people, not numbers. The numbers we are talking about are people. They have faces, they have stories, they have families, and they matter.
Take Patrick Kearns, a registered nurse in Iowa City at the VA Medical Center and father of two adult children with disabilities. He told the Des Moines Register:
He continued:
In Kansas, where nearly 90,000 Americans' health coverage is at risk, including 18,000 Kansans on Medicaid, Kathy and Jacob shared the story of their adopted sister Mireya, who suffered a traumatic brain injury at just 4 weeks old--I am sorry--7 weeks old. Because of Medicaid, the family could afford at-home nursing services before their sister passed away in 2024.
Jacob told the Kansas Reflector:
In Missouri, 250,000 Americans' care is on the chopping block, including over 100,000 with Medicaid.
In the suburb of St. Louis, Sandra told the Kaiser Family Foundation Health News that she worries about her 20-year-old daughter Sarah and the 24-hour service she needs, including in-home nursing.
Sandra said:
In Nebraska, 74,000 people could lose coverage, including 26,000 Americans on Medicaid. Dr. Ann Anderson Berry, who works at Children's Hospital in Omaha, NE, told Nebraska Public Media that these cuts would greatly harm those in Nebraska's rural communities.
According to Dr. Anderson Berry, ``this is not just a health care issue; it's a workforce issue, an education issue, an economic issue. Communities without access to safe childbirth cannot attract or retain young families. They struggle to grow, and they suffer generational consequences. Nebraska simply deserves better. Our rural families deserve better. Cutting Medicaid may save money on the spreadsheet, but it will cost lives in real communities and put the expensive burden of care back on our communities.''
In South Dakota, 31,000 Americans' insurance is at risk under this bill, including 12,000 Americans on Medicaid. Retired family physician Tom Dean, from Wessington Springs, shared his concerns about what the cuts to Medicaid will mean for nursing homes and the health of moms and babies.
He told the South Dakota Searchlight:
I know that my Republican colleagues are hearing these stories from their constituents, and we need to make sure that they can't ignore them. These stories and the people behind them make all the difference in this fight to protect Medicaid. I am proud to give them a voice in the Senate, as my Republican colleagues continue their crusade to rip away healthcare from 17 million Americans.
The American people don't like this bill, and that includes Americans who live in red, blue, and purple States. We are going to keep ringing the alarm bells on behalf of Americans in every corner, in every part of this Nation and protect the critical coverage working families need and deserve. Lives depend upon it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. President, I rise today, along with my colleagues from Illinois and from Wisconsin. And you just heard from Senator Baldwin about the effects of this budget bill on the Midwest.
I guess I would start by asking the same questions as our colleague Senator Tillis, who just announced he wasn't going to seek reelection, after the President threatened him with a primary, and after he took a vote and had the audacity to ask the questions that had to be asked about this bill.
And you heard him today. He talked about how he had talked to the hospital association in his State, how he had talked to the Governor's Office, how he had gotten the actual data on the effects of Medicaid in North Carolina. And then he asked the question: How hard is it to see the impact of these proposals? And he asked: What is wrong with putting a little daylight on what is going on here?
So that is what I am going to do in my few minutes here--put a little Midwestern daylight on what is going on here--and that is that, under this bill, 17 million people would be kicked off their healthcare because of the Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act changes.
That was 16 million people until we got the updated numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. That is a nonpartisan group.
It also drives $4 trillion in debt. It used to be $3.4. Now it is up to $4 trillion. And what will that mean? That will mean big time in the Midwest, where I have so many of my own constituents wanting to buy their first house. It is going to mean major increased interest rates. It is going to mean difficulty in buying all kinds of things for which you would take out loans or for small businesses--all for giving a bunch of tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, $400,000 for multimillionaires.
Our colleagues are going to raise costs and take healthcare and food away from millions of Americans.
So my colleagues have talked about Senator Baldwin and Senator Durbin, and talked about the effects that this bill has in the Midwest when it comes to healthcare and the closing of the rural hospitals. The Midwest has a huge number of these rural hospitals. It is about half of them that would be forecast to close.
She talked about the Medicaid cuts. So I am going to talk about a different piece of this, and this is the impact of cuts to food assistance.
There is no avoiding the facts. Here they are. About a month ago, the House passed a budget bill, as you know, that cut nutrition assistance by nearly $300 million. It put the country on track to eliminate SNAP for 4 million Americans and reduce benefits for millions more. I was hopeful that we would go in another direction. And while there were some changes made by the Republicans on the Agriculture Committee that I appreciated, it still amounts to over $185 billion in cuts from the SNAP program.
And let me remind you that the vast majority of people on SNAP are older Americans, people with kids, veterans, and people with disabilities.
We were just out on the Senate steps with a number of those people and the groups that they represent and faith leaders, talking about this very subject.
Why them? Why give tax cuts to the wealthy on their backs?
We know that the impact of the ``Big Beautiful Betrayal of a Bill'' will be even more stark in the Midwest.
In the Midwest, here are some examples. Americans use SNAP benefits-- nearly 155,000 people in Nebraska. And let's face it. That is not the biggest population State, but 155,000 Nebraskans use SNAP; about 190,000 people in Kansas; 260,000 people in Iowa; 660,000 people in Missouri; 700,000 people in the State of Wisconsin. Senator Baldwin just talked about the impact of healthcare there--but 700,000 people of my neighbors in Wisconsin. Nearly 1.5 million people in Michigan use SNAP. And in Minnesota, it is 450,000.
So, yes, those people will be affected greatly by this faux shift to the States. And, unfortunately, while we tried to fight part of this-- the State shift--we were not able to get that changed, in the last few days.
This means certain States. I am just going to give you some examples. Hundreds of millions of dollars are supposed to shift over to States in the Midwest. When 41 of the 50 States in our country have balanced budget amendments, what are they supposed to do? Cut infrastructure? Cut law enforcement?
The majority of these cuts--and this is why this is such funny math-- are shifts to the States, and it is why Governors, especially in the Midwest, like Governor Kelly in the State of Kansas, who has been speaking out big time on this, why they are so concerned about the shift.
In addition--and this is not something everyone thinks about when they think about SNAP, but we think about it big time in the Midwest-- it is farmers and grocers. Over a third of America's farmland is located in the Midwest. That includes more than 722,000 farm operations, which is more than one-third of farms nationwide.
So why would farmers care about this? Well, they will lose revenue because Americans won't be able to buy their products. And that loss-- that is the SNAP program. Right? It buys food from America, just like international organizations were buying food from America with USAID. That has been cut. Or the Trump tariffs which dry up
In addition, this is going to be a big hit to our grocers. In many rural counties throughout the Midwest, their independent grocery store is the lone grocer in the county. So in 76 counties nationwide, they don't even have a single grocery store, and half of those are in the Midwest.
I recently visited an employee-owned grocery store in rural Long Prairie, MN--population: 3,600. Businesses like that operate on tight margins, and they usually serve not just that county, as you can see from the numbers I just provided you, but the surrounding counties, or they may be the only ones in town. To businesses like that, the cuts to SNAP are pretty significant because that is sometimes the margin on which they are able to stay alive as a business.
This would make it harder and harder and more expensive for those grocery stores. It could put them out of business. That is for sure. That is what the grocery stores believe. But it also hurts the individual people in their areas, because in the rural areas, you have an overwhelming number of seniors, you have got an overwhelming number of veterans, and you have just an overwhelming number of the people who are using these kinds of grocery store.
So SNAP supports hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wages of these independent grocers, farm and other industries, including more than 1,700 jobs in Nebraska, more than 1,900 jobs in Kansas, more than 2,600 jobs in Iowa, more than 7,000 jobs in Missouri, more than 6,000 jobs in Wisconsin, more than 13,000 jobs in Michigan, more than 4,000 jobs in Minnesota.
We know that from farmers and truckers to local grocers, for every dollar invested in SNAP about $1.50 of economic activity is generated nationwide.
For many Midwesterners, this bill would make the difference between having a grocery store in their region or not.
I mentioned the shift of billions of dollars of costs to States that will blow holes through the State budget. They won't be able to support it, and, sadly, our Republican colleagues know this, because 44 States--44 States--have this balanced budget rule, and they are going to be forced to choose between paying the cost for food and paying for critical services. That is why 23 Democratic Governors, all of them, just laid out in a letter to Congress that these cuts don't just increase State costs; they make it nearly impossible for States to effectively plan for these long-term budget impacts.
Those are Governors from Kentucky, with Governor Beshear, to Arizona, with Governor Hobbs. Across the entire Nation, we heard from these Governors, not to mention the Governors such as Governor Pritzker in Illinois and Governor Walz in Minnesota and Governor Kelly in Kansas and Governor Whitmer in Michigan.
Based on 2023 figures--ready for this?--the House and Senate version of this bill would shift--and it varies because the bills are different. But this is how much money we are talking about: between $16 million and $49 million onto the State of Nebraska, between $61 million and $101 million in costs onto Kansas. Imagine the budget. Suddenly, oh, you have got to do an extra $60 million. Too bad, you have a balanced budget amendment.
Up to $26 million in costs onto Iowa, between $225 million and $376 million onto the State budget in Missouri, up to $68 million in costs onto Wisconsin, where Governor Evers was also a signatory of this letter.
Between 456 and 761 million in costs onto Michigan and between 43 million and 128 million in costs onto Minnesota.
And those numbers are on top--on top--of an increased administrative cost shift to States. It used to be 50-50; now it is 75-25.
Hello, States. You with strapped budgets, we are now making you pay 75 percent of administrative costs, which would make it even harder for States to invest in the staff training and upgraded financial systems that would make the program more sound and reduce payment errors.
It is not just the State budgets that will be affected. In many States, including Minnesota and Wisconsin, it is counties rather than the States that run the SNAP program.
So I had a visit from some of the rural counties. And they--talk about living off a margin, a thin margin, trying to help their taxpayers trying to get this done, in States like Minnesota and Wisconsin that believe in strong local government--big surprise--our States and a number of other States with bigger rural areas have decided: We would rather have the counties do this.
So now these cost shifts will go directly to these county governments. And you would not believe the numbers of what they would have to do to increase their taxes in these rural counties. They said: We can't do that.
So if that happens, they will have to raise their local property taxes or cut county services.
In the past, we have said that if you are raising kids or taking care of an older relative, we are going to help you feed your family, even if you don't have a job. This reconciliation bill would change that. It would withhold food assistance from families raising kids over the age of 13 and adults 55 and up if they don't meet the new requirements.
The Senate bill also eliminates an existing exemption for veterans, homeless people, and former foster youth, an exemption my Republican colleagues supported in the Fiscal Responsibility Act just 2 years ago.
So this is a shift among the party. The Republican party actually said this was a good idea to have exemptions for vets and homeless people and former foster youth. Not anymore. These are people who are already struggling, veterans who have sacrificed to serve our country.
I believe that when our veterans signed up to serve, there was no waiting line. And when they are in this country and they need help with food or they need a job or they need a home, there shouldn't be a waiting line in the United States of America.
So everyone that I have talked to about this, just as Senator Tillis was saying about Medicaid in North Carolina--and I spent time on this. I visit all 87 counties in my State every year. I am up to 49. So I have been able to talk to people who aren't political, who are Republicans, talk to people I just run into in rural grocery stores in the vegetable line. I mean, I have talked to a ton of people. And what they have said to the store managers, to the food shelf volunteers, to those that take SNAP: This isn't a good idea.
That is what the public opinion polls say: FOX News poll, 60 percent of people say this bill is a bad idea; 2 to 1 say it is going to help wealthy people and not them.
Well, they are right about that. This is a betrayal of the middle class, and it only takes four of our colleagues--and four in the House, by the way--to stand up and say: We need to rewrite this thing. Let's start over.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
Mr. President, I rise today to express my strong opposition to the devastating and dangerous tax-and-spending bill that Senate Republicans are trying to jam through this weekend on a party line vote, a bill that will gut essential programs like Medicaid and SNAP just to pay for even more tax breaks for billionaires.
So let's be clear about what is happening here. This ``Big Beautiful Betrayal,'' it isn't about fiscal discipline. It is fiscally reckless. It isn't about responsibility or doing what is best for average Americans. It is about misguided priorities. It is about giving more to the ultrawealthy on the backs of hard-working families.
This bill will take away healthcare and food assistance from people and families who need it most just so DC Republicans can pay more for tax cuts for those who need them the least. DC Republicans want to have more tax cuts for those who need them the least.
Once again, Republicans in Congress are putting the interests of the ultrawealthy above the needs of hard-working families, children with disabilities, seniors, and Americans who rely on Medicaid each and every day.
Earlier this year, I held a roundtable in Las Vegas with Nevada families who
I talked to people like Jessica, whose daughter Kay--well, she is 4 years old. She was born with Down syndrome and was recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Jessica relies on Medicaid to help cover the cost of weekly physical, speech, and occupational therapies for Kay, all of which are responsible--well, they are helping her learn to walk, to use utensils, to write her own name.
Imagine when her mother sees her write her own name. It is a proud moment.
Kay also has a cardiologist, an endocrinologist to manage conditions related to her Down syndrome. Medicaid covers these doctors. It covers her insulin. It covers the insulin pump that allows Jessica to manage her daughter's diabetes around the clock, all because Kay can't communicate when her blood sugar is dangerously low or high.
And Jessica said something at that roundtable I will never forget. She told me:
What I would have to do--
Kristy, another Nevada mom, was also at that roundtable. Her daughter Sadie is 13. She has been bravely battling an aggressive form of leukemia for the past 2 years. Since her diagnosis, Sadie has spent more than a year and a half in and out of the hospital undergoing treatment for her cancer--all covered, thankfully, by Medicaid.
Sadie's father--well, he passed away during the COVID pandemic, sadly, and Kristy became Sadie's sole caregiver and sole provider.
Medicaid is critical, and, simply put, it is lifesaving. So why are Republicans looking to cut it? So billionaires can get another tax break? So that Republican lawmakers can hand out trillions of dollars in tax giveaways to the wealthiest 1 percent while thousands of people lose access to lifesaving care?
The cuts proposed to Medicaid--well, they are going to affect veterans and Nevadans with cancer who can't work and who will be kicked off their health insurance, the insurance that they need to stay alive. It will kick the family caregiver, who takes care of both her aging parents, maybe off her own coverage.
The majority of adults on Medicaid already work, and Republicans are counting on savings from these hard-working Americans losing coverage, too, because of paperwork? Paperwork is just going to be so bureaucratic, so full of redtape. The goal is to make it so hard, so damn burdensome, that nobody can do it. No one can go to work, take care of their sick loved one, be sick themselves. They are hoping they drop off, even if they technically qualify. This is where they find their savings.
Aren't we supposed to cut redtape and improve the lives of our constituents? And so this is just cruel. It is a lose-lose situation. People can't work because they have a life-threatening illness, or they are working and they miss the complicated new paperwork which people are hoping that they can't do so they will drop off; and that is where they will find the savings. They will lose their health insurance, and maybe they will drop off, and they will lose their life too.
All for a tax break for the wealthiest, for the billionaire Cabinet of our current President. This is just shameful.
This bill would also slash SNAP, as my colleagues before me have told you some of the statistics. SNAP, the nutrition program that helps nearly one in six Nevadans put food on the table. Most of these recipients are children. When they cut this program, you tell me what our families are supposed to do. You tell me what families are supposed to do when they cut food assistance. How are they going to put food on the table? What will they say to their hungry children? Sorry, kids. You have to go hungry so billionaires can get a tax break.
This just can't be right. This just can't be right.
And it doesn't stop there. This bill threatens thousands of good- paying union jobs in Nevada, across our country, by letting critical tax credits for solar, for wind projects expire before those projects can even get off the ground.
You know, in Nevada, we have more solar jobs per capita, more than any other State in the Nation, and we have enough solar energy to power nearly 1.3 million homes. It is a growing, terrific industry in Nevada. We need all the energy we can get at an affordable price.
And this bill--this bill is going to decimate this important and growing industry, not just in my State but in States across this country.
And on top of that, Republicans have added an additional new tax on wind and solar projects. It just won't kill the industry. Like I said, it is going to raise prices on hard-working families, families who are already paying too much for their energy.
I thought we were supposed to be lowering prices, creating opportunities, expanding and investing in our infrastructure and in our Nation. But this bill is going to add more taxes, slash products, and raise energy prices for hard-working families.
And all of this is causing companies across the country to stall or cancel projects over the uncertainty of losing access to the tax credits. This means fewer jobs, less investment, and just more families wondering, actually, how they are going to make ends meet.
And we are talking about an industry that supports nearly 280,000 American workers: electricians, technicians, construction crews. I could go on and on about all the jobs that are in our solar and wind industry. And we are pulling the rug right out from under them--right out from under them--and killing thousands, hundreds of thousands, of clean energy jobs.
Again, I want to remind you that all of this is for one purpose and one purpose alone: to give tax breaks to billionaires.
So anyone who supports this bill is not pro-worker. They are not looking out for underdogs, for hard-working families. They are just focused on making the rich, well, richer. And I am not going to stand by and let Nevada families lose access to their healthcare, to their food assistance, to their jobs--all so billionaires can pad their pockets.
And I want to remind people what Democrats--what we did--when we used the reconciliation process. We expanded health insurance subsidies; and for the first time, we gave Medicare the authority to negotiate for lower drug prices for our seniors. We invested in our clean energy future. We cut costs for families, instead of cutting lifelines.
And this DC Republican bill is extreme; it is cruel; and it is not what the American people want.
People want lower costs. People want economic security. Parents want their kids to have care when they are sick and a fair shot to thrive.
They don't want their future sold off to billionaires.
So I say to my Republican colleagues: Please don't turn your backs. Please don't turn your backs on families who need you, who need this, the most.
I want you to come look at my Nevada moms and my Nevada dads in the eyes and tell them they don't matter, that their children don't matter, that the lives of their kids don't matter because they won't get the care they need. And I shudder to think of the consequences.
Please, come to Nevada. Sit with these parents and tell them that they don't matter. I don't know how you could face them and gut Medicaid to give billionaires a tax cut, but that is what you are about to do. The American people deserve better. And I will fight every single step of the way to make sure that they get it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. President, I am going to be brief. I promise, Senator Van Hollen, I am going to be about 5 minutes. This is an easy one.
No. 1, I probably should have said this earlier. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I completely disagree with the narrative of the billionaire tax. Folks, this is actually reducing or making sure we don't raise taxes on people like me who grew up in trailer
I also should have thanked Senator Crapo. He is a good friend, a great leader. I should have thanked him for the hard work he is doing. I got a little focused on the Medicaid failed baseline that is in the bill, but I should have started with that. Thanks to Mike Crapo and Senator Thune, whom I admire as our leader.
I am here to talk about the production tax credit and the investment tax credit. It is another classic example where think tanks and people who haven't worked a day in business are setting policy in the White House without a clue about what they are potentially doing to our grid.
A lot of people probably--I had Alex Weinstein, who is a self- described philosopher and expert in this area in my office--talking with three people, practitioners, that actually work in it. One is someone who specializes in power purchase agreements for large businesses.
Walmart is one of the most sophisticated buyers of electrons in the world. They map out their power requirements years in advance. They want to make sure their food doesn't spoil and they have power running. They have already made several power purchase agreements with projects underway, folks. This bill is basically gutting it.
Instead, everybody is high-fiving.
What is amazing to me is the mark that we laid down the other day almost achieved the same level of cuts as the House bill, within $30 billion--within $30 billion. And instead of thinking that was progress, somebody got cute and decided to take away in construction and put it in service.
Let me tell you why this is disingenuous. I was a partner at Pricewaterhouse and worked in utilities practice--large utilities, like TECO, Duke, Florida Progress, AEP. I know this industry. I understand baseload; I understand peaking; and I understand this technology, which is increasingly becoming viable because of storage as a part of augmenting baseload.
Now, we have the Walmarts and all these data centers, and everything we wanted to bring back onshore putting in these power purchase agreements teed to these projects, like solar, in particular, like wind, and other innovative--renewable natural gas, methane, hydrogen. I can go on.
But somebody, a self-described philosopher in a think tank that I admire a lot, but I realized, if you are a philosopher and in a think tank, you, by definition, have never worked in an operational role. You can't possibly understand what happens to this pipeline of power purchase agreements and the future of our grids.
Here is what is going to happen. Wipe it clean. Put an excise tax in. Effectively throw the football into the end zone, spin it, walk away, do the party dance. And what you have done is create a blip in power service because there isn't going to be a gas-fired generator anytime soon.
Folks, the generator is necessary to create power with gas--best case, 5 years from now. That is best case, 5 years from now. So you can't get that online and, at the same time, this whole pipeline is going down.
So I want that philosopher to tell me that he understands how to plan out power over time and to let me know that when all these projects fail--some will make it, some will get subsidized, some will go bankrupt--so it won't be Armageddon, but it is going to be a problem. So they better get it right.
It is another example, folks, when you rush a bill and don't think through the implementation, you don't get it right. I hope my colleagues recognize it is half-baked. It is another reason why we should go back to the House mark, get Medicaid right, so I can come onto the floor and tell my colleagues on the other side of the aisle why they are wrong on all the attributes of the House mark; why they are wrong on some of their characterizations of the tax bill; and why they will be wrong on an energy policy that makes sense.
But I have to vote against the bill for my own party--that I have never parted from before--because we are rushing to an arbitrary deadline with people who have never worked a day in this industry. Maybe they philosophized and have written a few white papers on it but haven't gotten their hands dirty. This is another segment of the bill that needs to change.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. President, Donald Trump likes to call the bill that Republicans are trying to rush through this Senate the Big Beautiful Bill.
Well, it is big all right. It took the Senate clerks nearly 16 hours to speed read through it. But it is only beautiful if you are a billionaire or otherwise very wealthy in America. For everybody else, this is a big ugly betrayal of a bill--betrayal because tax cuts for billionaires are coming at the expense of virtually everyone else.
I agree with many of the things my colleague from North Carolina, Senator Tillis, just said. But I have also read the bill. If you look at the bill, the tax benefits overwhelmingly go to the very highest income earners in the United States of America. Fifty percent of those tax benefits go to just the top 5 percent.
So this is a choice that is being made by Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress to give to billionaires additional tax handouts at the expense of the rest of the country. They are choosing to engage in a huge transfer of wealth from people who are working paycheck-to- paycheck to those who are living off their huge inheritances or gigantic stock portfolios.
Americans are going to have to pay for the tax cuts for billionaires in many, many ways. Millions will lose access to healthcare. Others will no longer be able to put food on the table. Others will not be able to afford to pay heating bills on freezing nights. Virtually, every American will see their energy bills increase and their health insurance premiums go up. And every American is likely to face higher borrowing costs for their home mortgages or car loans--again, all so billionaires and very wealthy people can get big tax cuts.
Let's look at some of the real hits to American families, starting with the attack on healthcare. Donald Trump said he would ``love and cherish'' Medicaid. He said the people won't be affected. That is a lie. What he loves are tax cuts for his billionaire buddies.
Let's just take a look. This bill pays for over a trillion dollars in tax giveaways to people who make over $500,000 every year by cutting a trillion dollars of health benefits from those who rely on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
Think about that tradeoff. Indeed, because of the cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in this bill, 12 million Americans will lose access to healthcare coverage. On top of that, another 5 million Americans will lose access to health coverage because Republicans refuse to extend the tax credits that millions of middle-class Americans use to purchase coverage through the Affordable Care Act.
So while extending tax cuts for the very wealthy, they are not extending the healthcare tax credits that middle-class Americans use to help afford health insurance. The result of these cuts and the refusal to extend those tax credits means that nearly 17 million of our fellow Americans will lose access to healthcare coverage.
In my State of Maryland, that is 229,000 of my fellow Marylanders. And who are these Americans? Who are these Marylanders? They are babies and children. Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program cover 38 million children in America, 700,000 children in Maryland.
Medicaid covers 40 percent of births in America, over 40 percent of births in Maryland. More mothers will die as a result of pregnancy- related deaths if this bill passes.
I think we will also know Medicaid is especially important to helping people through the vulnerable stages of their lives. It covers one in four people with mental health or substance use disorders. It is the primary payer for long-term health services, covering 60 percent of nursing home residents. If even a fraction of those residents lose coverage, entire nursing homes can close, and those families will have to figure out how to care for their expelled loved ones. An analysis that was done estimates that as many as 500 nursing homes could close because they are on the cusp.
Rural hospitals are also especially vulnerable. It is estimated that up to 300 rural hospitals could close if this bill passes.
Americans with disabilities, Medicaid is absolutely essential to their lives. It helps them receive home and community-based care so they don't have to choose between getting the care they need and being separated from their loved ones. A study by Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania predicts that this bill before the Senate will result in over 51,000 preventable deaths each year--preventable deaths. So, officially, the death certificates will say that somebody passed away because they had late-stage cancer. It was detected too late because they couldn't get the preventive care they needed or an accident occurred at a nursing home because there were not enough nurses on site. But those reasons, those conditions will have been set because this bill passed.
And, again, making millions of Americans more vulnerable to pay for tax cuts for the ultrawealthy is unconscionable, but it is the choice being made in this bill.
Now, 17 million people who will lose their health coverage is a very big number to wrap our heads around. So I want to read just a few stories of Marylanders who rely on Medicaid and who have been watching closely this whole effort that has unfolded on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
I had a call from one of my constituents who has a son. Her son takes chemotherapy, and he relies on those chemotherapy treatments to sustain his life. She wrote to me that if he loses access to his health insurance, that it would be ``a death sentence.''
Another Marylander wrote to me about his autistic son who is still able to work but who depends entirely on Medicaid for support. He also said: Please don't let the Senate pass this bill.
And the stories go on and on and on.
Just the other day, Senator Alsobrooks and I had a telephone townhall. We had 12,000 Marylanders joining us. After that call, we received many more stories about people who would really be in desperate shape if they lost access to their health coverage.
Now, on top of the 17 million Americans who stand to lose their health coverage, all other Americans are likely to see higher premiums because what happens when you have uncompensated care is more people go to the emergency rooms at the hospitals. Those hospitals can't just eat all of those additional costs, and at the end of the day, those additional costs cycle through the system in the form of higher premiums for others. We are already seeing that impact in Maryland as insurance companies today look at the possible liability they will have going forward as a result of this legislation.
Beyond the 17 million who will lose access to affordable healthcare, you also have millions of Americans who are going to be hit as a result of the cuts to the food and nutrition programs, to the SNAP program. We are going to see a whopping 20 percent cut--$200 billion--to the SNAP program. Over 40 million Americans get some kind of help from that food and nutrition program, and over 3 million of them will lose their SNAP benefits entirely. Others will see rising costs. In Maryland, it is going to impact 684,000 people, most of whom are families with kids.
In addition to 17 million Americans losing access to healthcare coverage and in addition to the 40 million Americans who will be impacted by cuts to food and nutrition programs, I want to just focus for a moment on another hit to American households. Some of us have discussed this on this Senate floor before, but it hasn't gotten as much attention, and it relates to the energy bills Americans pay, including their electric bills, because this bill will drive them up. It directly attacks the production of more clean energy, and less energy with rising demand means higher costs for households.
I don't know if folks remember about a year ago when Donald Trump had a state dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where he begged 20 fossil fuel CEOs for campaign cash. It was reported on at the time. Well, he succeeded in raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations. Now we see the payoff in this bill to those powerful special interests, and that payoff comes in two forms.
First, this bill gives big oil companies a new $1 billion tax break. As a result, some of the fossil fuel companies will pay zero dollars-- zero dollars--in Federal income tax.
Second, this bill--and the Senator from North Carolina referred to some of the provisions that will have this impact. This bill sabotages the production of more clean energy. It does so by slashing production and investment tax credits for clean energy and scuttling new clean energy projects. It continues the Trump administration's baseless attacks on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is a program we established that will be a win, win, win for our environment, for our economy, and for family pocketbooks.
By cutting these clean energy incentives and initiatives, this bill will reduce the overall amount of energy added to our electric grids by at least 50 percent by 2035. Think about that. So this bill is going to result in a dramatic reduction in the amount of new energy produced that goes on the electric grids. With less energy generated and higher demand, household energy costs and bills are going to go up. In fact, it is predicted that household electricity bills will go up by $110 on average as soon as next year and by up to $400 per year for families over the next decade.
This will serve the interests of big oil and gas producers and utility companies that benefit from the higher prices that consumers will have to shell out. This will also do something else. It will surrender entirely the clean energy playing field to China, which already has a big head start on us in the area of clean energy deployment. So this is not America first; this is very much America in retreat.
I don't often agree with Elon Musk, but he is absolutely right when he said just a few days ago that the latest Senate draft bill will ``destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country--utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.'' That is the Republican Senate bill--looking in the rearview mirror rather than ahead.
Again, what is the driving purpose? What is the North Star of this bill? It is to give very, very wealthy people tax cuts at the expense of everybody else. Everything else is sacrificed.
As a result of those tax cuts, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the highest income earners will get an average tax break of $255,000. The top one-tenth of 1 percent will get a tax break of $255,000. Individuals making over $1 million a year will get a $35,000 tax break. As I said earlier, almost 50 percent of all of the tax benefits, all of the tax moneys, will go to the top 5 percent of income earners. To make that happen, as I have said, everything else gets sacrificed--cuts to Medicaid, cuts to food and nutrition programs, cuts to clean energy that result in higher costs for consumers.
But even after making all of those cuts and imposing all of that pain on so many Americans, this Republican bill is still going to add over $4 trillion to our deficit over the next 10 years and an estimated $35 trillion over the next 30 years.
So despite paying for part of those additional costs through cuts to Medicaid and food and nutrition programs, they are going to blow the roof off of our deficits and debt. Make no mistake, when you do that, you cost every American because it will generate upward pressure on interest rates, which raises costs for Americans who want to take out a mortgage to buy a home or want to get a car loan or for small businesses. In fact, the Yale Budget Lab projects that the House-passed bill would add over $1,000 a year to the cost of a mortgage and over $800 a year to the cost of a small business loan. That is the House- passed bill. The Senate bill will be worse because the Senate bill adds about $1 trillion more to the deficit over 10 years than the House bill.
I do want to just focus on a final aspect of the deficit and debt impact of the Senate Republican bill, and that is this very deliberate effort to use fraudulent accounting to hide the deficit impact of this bill from the American people.
Let me give you an example. Let's say you sign a contract to rent an apartment for $2,000 a month. You know that is going to cost you $24,000 for the full year. Now, at the end of the year, if you want to keep renting that apartment at that rate, any normal person would say: Well, that is going to cost them another $24,000. Senate Republicans want to tell the American people that the cost of continuing to rent that apartment for another year is zero--zero--because the amount of rent they have to pay in year 2 is the same rent they had to pay in year 1.
In other words, Republicans want to say that because they have been giving billionaires and wealthy people tax cuts for 10 years, it will cost nothing to extend them for another 10 years. That is the so-called current policy baseline.
In other words, if you just keep in place for another 10 years those same tax breaks for billionaires and others, we don't have to count the lost revenue, and we don't have to count the amount the deficit will increase as a result of that lost revenue. A third grader can see that this is bogus math.
Let me read a colleague's statement, made this year by somebody. Here is what he said:
I wanted to make sure I got that quote correct because it was made by a Republican Congressman from Arizona, Congressman Schweikert.
Here is another quote:
Who said that? Congressman Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas.
I think it is worth quoting those Republican Members of Congress because while I dramatically disagree with what they did in their House bill, at least they used honest accounting. At least they didn't try to perpetrate this budget fraud that we are witnessing here in the U.S. Senate--a budget fraud that would, I dare say, make the Enron scammers blush.
If you go through the numbers, it is dramatic. For example, an honest scoring of the bill shows that extending the individual tax rates from Trump 2017 will cost $2.2 trillion. That is what the House of Representatives said--$2.2 trillion. When you use the fraudulent budget math that Senate Republicans want to use, all of a sudden, that is $83 billion.
If you look at the cost of extending key deductions for businesses, the House used accurate accounting; it comes to $820 billion over 10 years. Under the Senate plan, it is $6 billion.
So I am not going to spend a ton of time going over this chart, but I do want to put it up here. This is from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The blue shade in each of these years shows what Senate Republicans say their bill will cost in each of those years. There is the so-called current policy baseline. This is what those House Republican Members called fraudulent accounting, and it is. If you add up all of those blue deficits over those 10 years, they claim it is $441 billion additional debt over 10 years. But if you use the honest accounting that we have always used in the U.S. Senate for the purposes of budget reconciliation, you get the full bar, including the orange numbers, which is $4.2 trillion in debt over those 10 years.
I do want to point out to my colleagues something interesting because they have these dashed orange lines. What this is representing is that some of these costs from lost revenue in some of these out-years go down. That is because under this House Republican plan, the tax cuts for people with the no tax on tips--they go away. They vanish. They vanish right here in 2029. But the tax cuts for very wealthy people, for billionaires and others--they go on for the 10 years. In fact, they go on forever.
The last point I want to make is, by letting them go on forever--the tax cuts for very wealthy people--Senate Republicans are violating the entire structure of the budget reconciliation process because when it was first devised, the entire purpose of it was to reduce our deficits and reduce the debt. Republican Senators are perverting the entire purpose of that special procedure that allows things to pass in the U.S. Senate with 51 votes and not having to secure the 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster. They are violating that entire structure. Again, why? Because they are hell-bent on making sure those tax cuts for very wealthy people go on forever--again, at the expense of everybody else.
I will just close by pointing out that it wasn't that long ago that just down the hall here, in the Senate Rotunda, Donald Trump took the oath of office. He looked at the cameras, and he said he wanted a new golden age for America.
But this is not a golden age for America. It is a gilded age for the wealthiest people in America, and those are the people he was really speaking to because they are the ones who were sitting behind him on Inauguration Day: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, the tech titans, the billionaire Cabinet--more billionaires than any Cabinet, by far, in American history.
That is who this bill serves. It serves very wealthy and powerful people, and it does so at the expense of everybody else in America, in one form or another.
And I hope--I hope--our Senate, on a bipartisan basis, will give it a big thumbs down.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, never in my time in Congress have I seen a bill that does so much damage in so many ways to so many people in so many States and that will affect so many generations.
The clerks have read the bill. It is now time for us to kill the bill. The point of reading the bill was to reveal that this bill has one goal, and that is to extend tax cuts to very wealthy Americans-- where the top 1 percent will get 60 percent of the benefit--and to make everyday Americans pay the price to fund those tax cuts.
It is no wonder, right now, that two in three Americans oppose this bill. The question is, Will the U.S. Senate oppose this bill?
Here are just a few ways that the President's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill will hurt Vermont. In Vermont, 11,500 people will lose their healthcare coverage under ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act. Twenty-one thousand Vermonters will lose Medicaid coverage and food nutrition programs that are so essential to the well-being of your citizens and mine. In Vermont, on the SNAP Program, 11 percent of our households use it, 65,000 people. A little over a third of households rely on the SNAP program, and they have kids. Nearly 3,000 veterans in Vermont rely on the SNAP program.
By the way, we are talking about 6 bucks a day. Billions are going to be cut across the country. That is going to hurt Vermont, and it is going to hurt everyone.
In Vermont, some homeowners, to save money on their energy bills, use the home energy efficiency upgrades that were made possible under the Inflation Reduction Act. Those are being ripped apart. Folks saved about $420 to $980 a year. That is real money for people living paycheck to paycheck. This bill scraps that.
Here is the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good, we still have time to kill this bill, and we should kill this bill. We Democrats are united in opposition to this bill, but it is not only Democrats whose constituents are going to be hurt by this bill.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have an opportunity to make a choice. Read the bill and decide: Are you going to protect your constituents who are going to suffer the same afflictions as my constituents or are you going to defer to President Trump?
The bad in this bill is going to inflict bipartisan pain. This is not aiming at red States or blue States. This is aimed at working-class and middle-class Americans.
Just to give you an example, in West Virginia, a great State I visited, I went into a coal mine--the hardest working people ever, except maybe for Vermont dairy farmers. More than 76,000 people in West Virginia will lose access to healthcare because of this bill. And 278,000 West Virginians are going to lose access to the nutrition program, SNAP.
In Tennessee, more than 295,000 people will lose access to healthcare--Medicaid--through this bill. And for SNAP, it means 758,000 Tennesseans lose their nutrition benefits.
I just want to repeat here. This is the bipartisan infliction of pain. This is
Is it worth inflicting that kind of pain on so many when the tax cut benefits so few?
Let's talk more about what is in this bill, because the American people need to know what we are voting on.
It makes major cuts, of course, as I have said, in Medicaid. But the immediate effect of those Medicaid cuts is it really threatens the financial stability and the viability of the community hospitals that are in all of our communities.
Folks are going to show up to get care. Across the country, 17 million people will lose any reimbursement for Medicaid. So they will go to our community hospitals, and they will do what they do: They will provide care, even if they don't get paid. But they can only do that for so long. So those hospitals are literally threatening to go out of business in every single State.
This bill cuts Medicaid by over $930 billion. So that ripple effect is going to hurt all of our hospitals, and, absolutely, some of those are going to close. By the way, that is going to result in a higher cost shift so that those employers who are doing everything they can to provide employer-sponsored healthcare for their employees are going to see their premiums spike badly.
The bill is going to rip away food assistance programs that more than 42 million Americans need. That is $6 a day, as I mentioned, and that will be gone.
This, by the way, has a real impact on our farmers. They put food on our tables. One of the things that our farmers are so proud of is they feed America, and they feed the world. And they have been able to supply the food that is then distributed through the SNAP program. It is going to undercut the revenue that they get for doing really good for a lot of people across our country.
The bill takes us backward in our effort to expand energy production and fight climate change. The bill actually adds a tax on wind and solar. It takes away the incentives, and it adds a tax.
Ninety-five percent of the new electric generation--and we need so much more of it--in the past few years has come from clean energy. If we don't have that going into production to provide energy, along with storage technology, the cost of electricity to the people you represent and the folks I respect in Vermont is going up.
There is another aspect of this bill that just makes no sense being in this bill. It makes no sense being in any bill, particularly. It is a Republican-led bill that strips States of their right to pass laws to protect their consumers against AI threats and against social media threats. It imposes a moratorium for 10 years on any States taking any action. This affects Vermont directly. It affects every single one of our States.
How, I ask, can one argue they are for State rights and then strip States of being able to act on behalf of their own citizens?
This bill is a real threat to our economy. It is going to increase the debt, already about $35 trillion, by at least $3.3 trillion. And for what? Tax cuts to very, very wealthy people--very wealthy people-- multinational corporations that are having record profits, at the expense of healthcare, at the expense of our community hospitals, at the expense of our investments in clean energy, at the expense of our food and nutrition programs.
Invest it in what? It is destructive. It is not productive.
Inflation is going up under this bill. Just think of how much more we are going to pay in debt service--dead money. It is about $1 trillion.
Home mortgages, folks, are going to be paying at least $1,000 more; small business loans, at least $1,000 more. Grocery prices are definitely going up for all Americans.
There is an ugly aspect in this bill, as well, and it is that this bill is entirely in service of providing tax cuts largely to the very wealthy. The top 1 percent of income earners in this country will get 60 percent of the benefit. That is a couple hundred thousand people who will get immense tax breaks that exceed the so-called tax breaks that go to a couple hundred million Americans. And it is those in the 60- percent category who are going to be paying the higher prices for utilities, credit card debt, the cost of a car loan, rent, and groceries.
So I say, let's come to our senses and not do something that is a massive escalation of the wealth transferred from the working class and the middle class to the very, very wealthy.
Many of us have a number of amendments--and I do, too--to try to make the point that our job is to make things better for everyday working Americans, not inflict additional burdens on them.
We have a job to do, and it is to strengthen this economy and provide more stability for our families in our communities. In this bill, we are doing exactly the opposite--aggravating income inequality, not mitigating it; accelerating climate change, rather than diminishing it--making life tougher for everyday families.
I urge my colleagues to defeat this bill.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
Mr. President, this bill is a farce. Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around the table and saying: I have got a great idea. Let's give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire, and we will pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps-- we cut SNAP--we cut food aid to people?
It is a joke. I would say it was a joke, except it is not the least bit funny.
I have been in this business of public policy now for 20 years--8 years as Governor, 12 years in the U.S. Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.
The basic premise of the bill, as I said, is to cut benefits for the American people, particularly in the areas of healthcare and food, in exchange for tax cuts for the very wealthy.
I know my colleagues are going to come to the floor, because I have had this discussion before, and they are going to say: Oh, no, this is a middle-class tax cut. This is going to cut taxes for people in the middle class.
Well, here is a little suggestion of how to get out of this mess: If you cap the tax cuts at people making $400,000 a year--which is a pretty healthy income--the cost of this bill would drop by 60 percent, and you wouldn't have any need to cut Medicaid. By the way, there are Medicare cuts also built into this, and SNAP. So $400,000--in other words, we are for the middle-class tax cuts. That is OK. But just stop it at $400,000, and don't give the tax breaks to the people--a millionaire, under this bill, gets a $32,000 tax cut. A person making $5 million or $10 million gets a couple hundred thousand dollars of tax cut. I don't think they need it. They sure as hell don't need it as much as people need health insurance.
So just to put a fine point on it, this bill is literally--and remember my $400,000 suggestion so we are taking care of the middle class. But with 60 percent of the cost above $400,000 in income, this bill is literally taking food out of the mouths of kids to give a millionaire a $32,000 tax break.
Those are the facts. They are ugly. And like I say, if we were talking about this at random, sitting around at a lunch table, people would say: Well, that is a joke. That is ridiculous. Nobody would suggest that.
But here we are. And several of my colleagues, including Senator Tillis from North Carolina, have pointed out there is no rush on this bill. We don't have to do this bill by July 4 or July 10. There is no rush. These tax cuts don't expire until the end of the year. Let's take our time and write a decent bill. Let's kill this bill. It would only take four or five Senators on the other side. We can kill this thing and start over and write a decent bill, on a bipartisan basis, and I think we would find agreement on middle-class tax cuts.
But I think we can also do some things with expenditures that wouldn't be so bloody harmful. Medicaid. Let me start with hospitals. In Maine, I have talked to the hospitals. I have talked to the hospital association. I have talked to small hospitals, large hospitals. They are mostly running on a 1-, 2-, or 3-percent margin. The analysis is that this could cost us two to five of our rural hospitals.
And when a rural hospital goes out, several things happen. One thing is the
The second thing that happens is a loss of services for everybody in town, not just the Medicaid people. If that hospital closes, everybody in town is going to have to drive another 30, 40, 50, 100 miles to get care, and they are going to have to not only--there may be closures; there will certainly be cutting of services. We already have a serious problem in Maine with obstetric services. We have a county with no obstetric services. That is only going to get worse under this bill.
The hospitals are pleading with us to not do this. And again, do we really need to do this to give a millionaire a $32,000 tax break? It doesn't make any sense.
Now, I have talked about hospitals, but let's talk about people. The analysis is that 60,000 people in Maine would lose their insurance coverage--40,000 under Medicaid, about 20,000 under the Affordable Care Act.
We have had a lot of personal stories tonight. I want to tell a story about myself. When I worked here in the seventies, I had insurance. It was employer-supported insurance. We paid part of the premium. I had insurance as a junior staff member in this body 50 years ago. Because I had that insurance that covered a free checkup, I went in and had my first physical in 8 years, and I wouldn't have had that physical if the insurance hadn't covered it. I wouldn't have been able to spring for it.
I had that physical, and the doctors found a little mole on my back. They took it out, and I didn't think much of it. And I went in a week later, and the doctor said: You better sit down, Angus. That was malignant melanoma. You are going to have to have some serious surgery.
And a friend of mine who was a doctor said: Angus, here is my best advice. Let them be as radical as they want in that surgery.
And I had the surgery, and here I am. If I hadn't had insurance, I wouldn't be here. And it has always haunted me that some young man in America that same year had malignant melanoma; he didn't have coverage; he didn't have insurance; he didn't get that checkup; and he died.
That is wrong. That is immoral. So the idea of cutting health insurance from people is just--oh, well, they just won't have coverage for their doctors' visits. No. People die when they don't have health insurance. There is statistical analysis to bear that out. So this isn't any joke.
And by the way, people say: Well, we are talking about fraud in Medicaid. Listen, at almost a trillion-dollar cut in Medicaid, 15 million people being cut off--40,000 in the State of Maine--that isn't fraud; that is cutting people who need the care.
And I don't understand the obsession, and I never have--and I stood right there and watched John McCain cast that vote to save the Affordable Care Act, along with my colleague Susan Collins. I don't understand this obsession with taking health insurance away from people. I don't get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What is driving this? What is the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people, knowing that it is going to cost them--it is hard to calculate the cost--up to and including losing their lives.
OK. Let's talk about SNAP. Let's talk about SNAP. The average benefit for SNAP is $6 a day. You feed yourself on $6 a day. The average cost of a meal in the United States is about $10.50 a day, so we are already below cost, if you will.
And here is what it means in my State. Twenty percent of the children in my State are food insecure, and we are talking about cutting SNAP and taking dollars away from those kids. And I was interested in that, and I thought: Oh, that is pretty bad. I am worried Maine is at 20 percent, 20 percent of our kids are food insecure.
So I did a little research. In Arkansas, it is 24 percent of the kids who are food insecure; in Iowa, 17 percent; South Carolina, 14 percent; Michigan, 19 percent; Missouri, another 19 percent. That is one out of five kids are food insecure, and we are going to cut that food in order to give a millionaire a $32,000 tax cut.
That is not only bad policy, it is downright immoral.
OK. What is the other problem with this bill? There are so many. So many problems, so little time. It is irresponsible. It adds about $4 trillion to the deficit. And by the way, this current policy thing doesn't pass the straight-face test. A seventh grader knows that it is nonsense. If this bill doesn't pass, then there isn't a $4 trillion hit on the budget. If it passes, there is.
And the thing that really gives a lie to this nonsense is, also in this bill is a $5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. If it is not really debt, then we don't need to increase the debt ceiling. It is a sham. Voodoo budgeting.
So I don't want to hear any more from my colleagues about deficits. I don't want to hear any more crocodile tears about deficits. We are mortgaging our future. I hear all this drama about deficits from people who are voting for this bill to add $4 trillion to the deficit unnecessarily.
There is a saying of a famous New Englander: Your actions speak so loud, I can't hear your words. Your actions speak so loud, I can't hear your words.
Your actions are, you are adding to the deficit unnecessarily, so don't talk to me about deficits.
Now, the first rule, if you are in a hole, is stop digging. And we are in a hole. We are in a hole. So you stop digging by not passing this bill or not passing it in the extreme form that it is to give the tax benefits--60 percent of the tax benefits--to people making over $400,000 a year.
What has driven the deficit, if you go back and look over the last 20 years, there are three things: One was the unpaid-for Bush tax cuts--we had major tax cuts and then a war that we put on the credit card; the unpaid-for Trump tax cuts in 2017; and COVID. Now, COVID was an emergency. And the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 and 2010, those were emergencies. That is where you run deficits. But you don't run deficits when times are good, and that is exactly what we are doing here.
If you are in a hole, stop digging.
By the way, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group, has said--and I haven't heard this mentioned--this bill will actually accelerate the insolvency of the Social Security trust fund and the Medicare trust fund. There is a nice thing for you. It will make those funds go insolvent sooner than would otherwise be the case.
Gutting the IRS. By the way, I have another suggestion for my colleagues. You want to find $600 billion a year? Enforce the tax laws against cheaters. That is the estimate: $600 billion a year is left on the table because cheaters, mostly high-income, are not paying the taxes they owe. The poor stiff that gets a 1040, he has to pay it. Everybody knows what he is making. But it is these people with the fancy lawyers and accountants--and I am not talking about tax avoidance here. I am talking about stone-cold tax evasion, $600 billion a year. That would be nice, instead of cutting Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps.
Another piece of this bill that hasn't gotten much attention is ICE. The current budget of ICE is $9 billion a year. Under this, they are increasing it $75 billion over 4 years. That is an additional $18 billion a year. They are tripling the budget of ICE. They are tripling the budget. We are dangerously close to creating a Federal police force, which we have never had in this country, and we shouldn't have.
And by the way, I have never in my life seen a law enforcement officer with a mask on. I don't get where that came from, a law enforcement officer wearing a mask. Where I come from, people that wear masks are not the good guys, and I don't understand that.
But to triple this budget, you wonder where that is going to take this country.
So let me go back to the beginning. All this damage to give a tax break to a guy who is making a million bucks.
The chairman of the Finance Committee wasn't here, I think, when I said this. Mr. Chairman, if we limit the tax cuts to people making $400,000 and less, it will reduce the cost of this bill by 60 percent. It will ameliorate the need for any cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. It would also minimize the hit on the debt and the deficit.
There is no rush to pass this bill. Let's kill it, give it a merciful death over the next 24 hours, and then start over writing a responsible bill to deal with the expiring tax cuts for the middle class and deal with issues within the Federal Government that should be addressed.
But this bill is not the answer. It is a sham, and it is a shame, and it is embarrassing to even be debating this bill. It should have never come before us in this form. I hope that enough of my colleagues will see that this is an unnecessary damage to the citizens of this country and the citizens of their State. Every State's citizens are going to suffer, and this is something that we, in this body, can and should prevent.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
H.R. 1
Mr. President, what are we doing here? Seriously. I am still waiting for somebody to tell me how this makes sense. We are debating a budget that gives another round of tax cuts to billionaires and giant corporations on the backs of everyday Americans. And it also adds trillions of dollars to our national debt.
That doesn't make any sense to me. And it doesn't make sense to the Arizonans that I have been hearing from in every corner of our State. If you grew up in a household like mine where money was tight, you would know that budgets are about priorities.
I can still picture my mom sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out which bills to pay. You take the money you have, and you put it where it is needed. This budget clearly tells the American people who President Trump and Republicans in Washington think need help.
If you are a billionaire, it says: We have got your back.
But if you are a parent trying to provide for your family, a senior in a nursing home, or a child who counts on school for your only hot meal, you are on your own.
This isn't about balancing the books. It is about picking winners and letting everyone else fall behind. And who loses? It is the Americans working two jobs, raising kids, caring for elderly parents, and just trying to stay afloat, because if you grew up in a family like mine, you also know how hard people work to reach their American dream--the promise that if you work hard, your kids will get a good public education, you will be able to put food on the table, you will be able to go to the doctor and stay healthy, and your kids will be able to grow up and achieve their own American dream.
This promise is already getting harder, and it is getting more expensive. We need to be working together across the aisle to ensure that everyone who works hard can have a brighter future. But that is not what my Republican colleagues are doing with this bill.
The plan that they are jamming through right now will put the American dream out of reach for more families. And for what? To hand out more tax breaks to people with more wealth than they could spend in 10 lifetimes.
Now, I have spent the last several months traveling across Arizona. I have been to our big cities Phoenix and Tucson. I have been to small towns like Clarkdale and Sierra Vista--talking to Arizonans face-to- face, listening to their stories, hearing what it would mean to them if Medicaid, food assistance, and other essential services got cut for them and their families.
What I have heard is clear: This budget is going to make it harder for them to stay afloat, let alone get ahead.
In Clarkdale, I met a guy named Christian. He is a rural hospital nephrologist. That is a kidney doctor. And he told me that his patients--many of whom rely on Medicaid for dialysis--are now considering stopping treatment altogether because they might not be able to afford it. He said:
That is the reality to many rural communities.
Another woman told me about her friend, a survivor of two car accidents and a spinal injury. Her friend relies on Medicaid to help her deal with her chronic pain. Without it--meaning Medicaid--she said that her friend might end her life because the pain is unbearable.
She asked me to deliver this message to my colleagues. She said:
People across Arizona are pleading with us to get our priorities right.
In Sierra Vista, I hosted a Medicaid townhall, and that is where I met this woman named Tara. She told us how she was once a single mother and how programs like Medicaid and SNAP helped her raise her kid and build a stable life. Today, she works a good job. She doesn't rely on these programs anymore, but here is what she said:
Just last week, I was in Tucson where I live--where Gabby and I live--helping distribute school lunches at a local high school. It is actually the high school that my wife went to. And I wanted to see firsthand what these summer meal programs mean for Arizona families.
These programs are funded through the United States Department of Agriculture, and they rely on data from SNAP and Medicaid to identify the children who need them the most. If this bill passes, a bunch of these kids that I served--I think it was last weekend--they won't be eligible for these programs anymore. It will be harder for them to access school meals which, I think we all know, compromises their academic performance.
That is the real cost of this legislation. It is not numbers on a spreadsheet. It is hunger. It is illness. It is fear. It is a bunch of folks who work really hard doing everything right, and they are still going to get punched in the gut.
And it is not just what I hear in person. My office gets hundreds of letters and phone calls every week from Arizonans. People are scared, and they want us to listen.
I want to share some of their voices.
Frank is a veteran on dialysis. He called this week, and he said:
Veterans should never have to say those words in this country. One of the most sacred promises we make to the men and women who serve is that we will take care of them when they return home. That promise doesn't end when they hang up the uniform.
It includes making sure that they can afford food, access healthcare, and live with some dignity. And yet here is Frank--sick, struggling, and wondering how he will survive because the programs he relies on are under threat.
Cheryl from Tucson, who is a 59-year-old widow, said:
Get this. She said:
So here is a woman with $40 extra, and she is helping other people.
She also says:
Karen from Scottsdale has worked for over 25 years helping veterans and people with disabilities. She wrote:
These are my constituents. These are folks who, unprompted, took time to write or call their Senator. And every single one of them is saying the same thing: We are barely holding on, and we are scared this is going to put us over the edge.
Now, I wish I could say that these stories were met with compassion by everybody here. But, instead, one of my Republican colleagues apparently said:
And another, when asked whether cutting Medicaid would cost lives, said:
Now, I didn't come here to throw jabs. I am repeating those words because they reveal how this budget was written without any connection to the real-world consequences. This isn't about politics. It is about people.
So I ask again: What are we doing here? Who do we serve? Is it people like Tara and Cheryl and Crystal and Frank who are working hard and doing everything right to just try to get by? Or is it a bunch of billionaires who have already made it and who don't need another handout?
If my colleagues don't believe me, I urge them to go read some of the emails and listen to some of the phone calls that they are getting. Maybe hold a townhall, listen to those folks, really listen to what they are saying. Don't crush their American dream. Don't rig the system even more against them. Don't take a vote just because it is easy.
We can do better for the people we serve. Mr. President, they deserve that from us.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. President, I rise today in disbelief. That may sound a little cheesy, but at the end of the day, I fundamentally believe in public service. I believe it can be a force for good, a force that gives people opportunity, a force that is people-powered, that can lift our neighbors up and instill hope, a force that meets the toughest challenges of our constituents. And that is why I am struck with disbelief.
Disbelief because if you believe these things like I do--which I would argue most of my colleagues here do--why would you be jamming this bill through?
At a time when Wisconsin families are asking us to take on the high cost of living and let them have a fair shot at success, Republicans are raising costs and making an already unfair tax system even worse.
My Republican colleagues are not using their time and energy to go after greedy corporations, not to lower the cost of housing, and not to expand access to affordable healthcare. But, rather, they are, instead, forging ahead with a bill that will kick millions of Americans off their health insurance, jack up prices for care for millions more, and literally take food off the tables of hungry families.
Look, I was on the same ballot as Donald Trump last year. I heard the same concerns from my constituents that he did. Families needed some breathing room.
My Republican colleagues often say that this President's victory gave him a ``mandate.'' Well, then, the President and I got the same mandate: to lower costs and give people the opportunity to live a steady and comfortable life. But in response, the difference could not be more stark. I am actually working to do something about it, and this bill--the landmark bill from this President and the Republican Party-- does just the opposite and will raise costs for families.
One of the biggest cost drivers I hear about is healthcare. Instead of standing up to big drug companies to lower prescription drug costs and instead of building on the Affordable Care Act to expand access to healthcare coverage, this bill actually terminates coverage for Americans. In fact, 17 million Americans will be kicked off either Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act because of this bill. That is like stripping healthcare coverage from the entire populations of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa combined.
These aren't just numbers; these are people. They are people who have stories, and they matter. I should know. After battling a childhood illness, I became one of those Americans labeled as having a preexisting health condition, and insurance companies were legally able to deny me coverage. But because of the Affordable Care Act, we changed that. We gave families like mine hope--hope that they can get healthcare at a price they can afford and sleep well at night knowing they have coverage.
Medicaid has given that same hope for generations to some of our most vulnerable neighbors. But with this bill, my Republican colleagues are instilling fear. When we talk about Medicaid, we are talking about the elderly, people with disabilities, and children. We are talking about a single mother of three who is struggling to make ends meet and so many more.
I have traveled the State of Wisconsin from Superior to Racine, La Crosse to Green Bay and everywhere in between, to hear from people who will be harmed by this bill. I have come to this very floor to share their stories, to try to help my Republican colleagues understand what this bill will mean. But it is not just the folks who need Medicaid to survive who are sounding the alarm. Take it from Dr. Abbigayle Willgruber, a family medical resident in rural Wisconsin. She said that this bill ``will deprive millions of Americans, particularly children, seniors, and individuals with disabilities, of the care they need to survive.''
She, continued saying:
Or take it from Rosangela Berbert, the executive director of an outpatient counseling center in the Fox Valley in Wisconsin, who said:
She continued:
I have more and more of these stories from doctors, nurses, and administrators on the ground who are spelling out the absolutely dire consequences of this bill.
In Wisconsin, we are already in a crisis when it comes to getting good healthcare in our rural communities. The system is broken, and this bill is destined to make it even worse.
While healthcare is near and dear to my heart, there is more bad news in this bill. Republicans' big betrayal will also take food assistance--the literal means by which some people are able to put nutritious food on the table--away from them. This bill will take SNAP assistance--our Nation's best way to make sure that no one goes hungry--away for more than 3 million Americans.
That leads us to the why. Republicans are making all of these cuts so that they can rig our Tax Code, which I must say already is deeply unfair to working families. They would further tilt it in favor of the biggest corporations and the richest in our country.
The Republican bill gives people at the top one-tenth of 1 percent, the richest of the rich, a tax cut of more than $250,000 every year-- yes, a quarter of a million dollars a year.
All the while, this bill hits working families the hardest. When taking into account the disastrous Medicaid and
It doesn't have to be this way. Yes, our system for taxes and healthcare is broken, but this bill is not the solution. This bill would make it harder for working families to have the opportunity to get ahead, harder for parents to get their kids healthcare, and harder for families to put food on the table.
We, Democrats and Republicans, should be working together to give some relief to workers, but instead Republicans will choose to go it alone and vote to give the biggest corporations and the wealthy another unfair leg up.
I will end with this: While I remain in disbelief and, frankly, disgust, I will always have hope. I have hope because it is not the people in this Chamber with the power; it is the people. It is the people who will sadly feel the repercussions of this bill. It is the people who are rising up and will hold anyone who passes this disastrous bill accountable. That is where the true power is.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Madam President, Democratic Senators have been on the floor for hours today pointing out what is in this thousand-page bill that took over 16 hours to read. I call it the thousand pages of pain and the billionaires' gain.
It is bad enough that my colleagues have been on the floor talking about how this bill is going to hurt people on Medicaid, taking food away from our children and families through major cuts to the SNAP program--healthcare, food, housing, energy support, you name it, the pain is in this bill--but one of the areas that people don't know about is that this bill actually has provisions that would take away support for our public schools. Let that sink in. It is not enough that this bill has a thousand pages of pain in just about every aspect of our lives that you can think of, but now they are coming after support for our public schools.
So today, I am rising as an advocate for the 49 million children who are enrolled in public schools across our country. Nearly 90 percent of K through 12 students go to public schools, including 95 percent of children with disabilities. Yet we have a regime that is actively working to end Federal support for public schools. We have a President who tried to totally eliminate the Department of Education, and, sadly for him, he can't do it through Executive order because only Congress can do that. But they are doing a lot of other things that withhold support for public schools.
So, as you know, Republicans in Congress are trying to undermine support for public schools through the first-ever national private school voucher program. Let that sink in--the first-ever national private school voucher program. That is taking money away from public schools and basically turning it over to private schools through a voucher program.
So let's be clear. The school voucher program provision isn't about money for schools; it is about even more money for billionaires because they are the folks who are going to get the most out of this voucher for private schools program.
Under this program, wealthy donors would receive large handouts for supporting school vouchers. This is a Washington Post headline:
Four billion a year--
So, specifically, the plan would provide a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. We are not talking about tax deductions; we are talking about a tax credit. This is money that comes right off your taxable amount. So what this bill would do is provide a tax credit of $5,000 or 10 percent of a taxpayer's adjusted gross income, whichever is greater. So a taxpayer making $10 million--we do have people who make $10 million a year--could contribute $1 million and receive a credit for that full amount. How do you like that? You can get a million dollars off your tax bill by contributing to this private school voucher program.
So rather than calling this plan what it is--and I tell you, the word ``scam'' comes to my mind; it is like scamming the public schools-- Republicans are deceitfully trying to sell this plan as an expansion of school choice for families. Oh, isn't this voucher program great? More families can send their kids to private school.
Here is the reality: Based on what we know about school voucher programs, they do not promote school choice. Let me give you two examples of why this argument does not hold water. For one thing, school vouchers do not cover the full cost of private school tuition. When was the last time anybody thought about how much private schools cost? You know, schools in Hawaii--private schools can cost something on the order of $15 to $20,000 a year, starting from kindergarten. A voucher program will not support that full amount. That means that families who want to send their kids to these private schools will have to make up the cost difference. Well, how many middle-income, low- income families will be able to exercise that choice to send their child to a private school that costs that much?
Not only that, as we have seen in States that have passed voucher programs, private schools often raise their tuition when they become eligible for vouchers. Iowa is an example. After they approved vouchers in 2022, private schools there increased their prices by over 20 percent for kindergarten and by over 10 percent for other grade levels.
Here is another example on this argument that this program promotes choice. There are fewer private schools in rural communities. So many families do not have access to private schools if they live in rural communities. How does this expand choice for these families?
The reality is the majority of vouchers have gone to wealthy families and to subsidizing school tuition for students who already attend private schools. Under this bill, Republicans will make that even worse by prioritizing scholarships for these students.
I am going to repeat that because not only is it bad enough that we are going to divert all of this money, basically, to private schools, but this bill actually has a provision that says people who will get these scholarships are students who already go to private schools.
In Louisiana, for example, the 99 percent of voucher tax credits there went to families with annual incomes above 200,000. In Virginia, the number was 87 percent of vouchers in that State going to wealthy families. In Arizona, it was 60 percent.
Americans have consistently rejected school voucher programs and initiatives. Nebraska, Kentucky, and Colorado have all voted against voucher programs within the last year.
In Nebraska, school vouchers were put on the ballot last November, and they were soundly defeated for the fourth time. This is not a Democratic or Republican issue. Nebraska is a red State. They voted for a Republican President by a 20-point margin, and yet they rejected school vouchers with 57 percent of the vote.
The bottom line is this: Vouchers take money away from public schools, and Americans of all political stripes understand that.
According to All4Ed, over two-thirds of voters would rather increase funding for public schools than increase funding for voucher programs.
That is not a new sentiment. In all 17 State referendums on school vouchers since 1967, voters have rejected these programs.
While the Republicans in this Chamber may not give a rip about public schools, the vast majority of Americans get it. Democrats, Republicans, Independents alike support strengthening our public schools, not taking money away from our public schools, because they know that strong public education is fundamental to a strong country.
Well, undeterred by public sentiment, Republicans are trying to create, as I mentioned, a nationwide school voucher program. It is not enough that some States have voucher programs, but now the Republicans, through this misguided, almost-thousand-pages-of-pain bill, want to provide $4 billion per year for a private school voucher program, with no accountability.
Remember, early on, I said that a huge percentage of children with disabilities go to public schools. Well, private schools do not have any responsibility to make sure that they are providing education for children with disabilities. So there is no accountability.
We all know that this kind of funding could be used for rural and low-income schools, for students with disabilities, for other programs that actually support and strengthen public schools.
Instead, under the Republicans' plan, that funding would go to wealthy donors who will receive large handouts, up to $4 billion a year for supporting school vouchers.
Again, this plan will enable a taxpayer making $10 million a year to contribute 1 million and receive a dollar-for-dollar credit for that full amount. And even worse, the taxpayer could contribute appreciated stock and avoid capital gains on their appreciation.
And there is all kinds of data on who owns stocks in this country, and generally it is the people with a lot of wealth.
So this bill had a provision that enabled people to donate appreciated stock so that they could escape capital gains taxes on that stock contribution totally.
So this Republican voucher proposal, outlandish as it is, was briefly delayed after it was deemed noncompliant with budget rules earlier this week. Republicans remain undeterred. They have decided to plow forward with a nearly identical plan.
When it comes down to it, this plan does not help students. It does not promote choice. It does not support public schools, where the majority of our kids go. We should be supporting our public schools, not taking resources away from them.
So my Democratic colleagues and I will continue to fight to fund quality public schools, to improve public education in this country-- foundational.
This voucher plan is yet another wrong-headed proposal that should be called out for what it is: a handout for the wealthy at the expense of hard-working American families.
I urge my colleagues to reject this idea.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
Madam President, I rise tonight in our moral moment in our Nation. As we debate this bill, so much is on the line. The healthcare of over 16 million Americans--750,000 of them Georgians--is on the line. Food for hungry children in a wealthy nation, where one in five children are already food insecure. They don't know where their next meal is coming from. Their livelihood, their welfare is on the line. The well-being of seniors in nursing homes and the disabled who rely on Medicaid and those who care for them is on the line. The fate of rural hospitals in Georgia, in Alaska, in Louisiana, in little towns all over this Nation that are right now barely hanging on is on the line.
And the scraps that they are throwing them, while cutting them, will not save them. And my friends on the other side of the aisle know it. They know that these scraps that they are throwing at rural hospitals will not save them.
And so in a very real sense, lives are on the line. We are in a moral moment because something else is on the line. I submit that the character of the country is on the line.
In a real sense, the question tonight is, Who are we? Not who we tell ourselves we are, but who are we really? What and who do we care about? What kind of nation are we? And what kind of people do we want to be? Who matters, and who doesn't? Who do we think is dispensable?
And no place is the answer to that question clearer than in a nation's budget. I submit that a budget is not just a fiscal document; a budget is a moral document. Show me your budget, and I will show you who you think matters and who doesn't.
And if this awful budget were an EKG, it would suggest that our Nation has a heart problem and is in need of moral surgery.
And so I am clear tonight. I understand the nature of what we are engaged in. This is a political process; it is. But it is also a moral exercise, not only for the Nation but for each of us individually, and especially for the mere 100 of us out of a nation of 300 million who get to vote, perhaps in a matter of hours.
We have the rare privilege of standing up for people who have entrusted with us the covenant of centering their families. It is a real privilege for the people of your State to say that since we can't all go to Washington, we are going to trust you in rooms of power to be thinking about our children, to be thinking about our parents as they deal with the blessings and the burdens of growing old.
And so the question for me tonight is, How will we will show up in this moment? And that is why yesterday I gathered in the Russell rotunda with a multifaith coalition of clergy to pray that lawmakers might have the courage to stand up to their party, to stand up to the special interests, and protect seniors in nursing homes and pregnant mothers on Medicaid and children who risk going to school hungry every single day in this country. One in five children in the wealthiest Nation on the planet are already food insecure. And with these SNAP cuts, this body is about to make it worse.
And so surrounded by clergy of many faith traditions, yesterday, I prayed that we would have the courage and I prayed that we would have the grace to stand as voices for the voiceless. And as I stood there, I could not help but feel a sense of deja vu.
This is not the first time I have been in our Nation's Capital speaking out against these policies that betray hard-working families. It was 8 years ago almost to the day in 2017 when Washington Republicans were trying to pass a tax bill that favored wealthy Americans over working families that I came to this building, not as a Senator but as a pastor. I had no idea that 8 years later I would be serving in this body. I had no notion that I would even run for the Senate. I came as a citizen.
And standing with a multifaith coalition, we were praying for our Nation's leaders, and we were gathered in the rotunda of the Russell Building. And, as we were singing and praying, the Capitol Police said: I am sorry, pastors. You can't sing and pray in the rotunda. If you do not disperse, we will have to arrest you.
And let me say that the Capitol Police did not mishandle us that day. They were first-rate professionals. But they said that if you don't disperse, we will have to arrest you. What they didn't understand is that I had already been arrested. My conscience had been arrested. My heart and my imagination--my moral imagination--had been arrested by this idea that we, as a country, are better than this.
I come from a tradition where you don't just pray with your lips; you pray with your legs. You put your body in the struggle for other struggling bodies.
And so here I am tonight, 8 years later, having transformed my agitation into legislation. I was arrested that day, but I have transformed my protest into public policy. Eight years ago, I was on the outside. Tonight, I am on the inside, but it is the same fight.
Some of us fight on the inside; some of us fight on the outside. Some of us get to serve in the Senate or in the House; others are just watching at home tonight. But be really clear that we are in the same fight, whether we are on the streets or in the suites--same fight.
In some ways, this is the same bill 8 years later, just worse. Like most horror movies, the sequel tends to be worse. When we were here 8 years ago, Washington politicians were trying their best to gut the Affordable Care Act. Remember that? When we were here, they were trying to gut ObamaCare out of political motives.
Millions of Americans were spared, but tonight is the sequel to that horror movie. They are back to their old political tricks, trying to dismantle the ACA again with this legislation. It is the same fight, just worse this time.
Instead of extending tax credits that would lower health insurance costs for the middle class, my friends on the other side are giving billionaires and the richest of the rich a tax cut. They are working real hard tonight to help billionaires because, God knows, they are having a hard time, apparently.
What that means is that 1.2 million Georgians and nearly 20 million Americans are going to see their healthcare premiums rise. That is what is at stake tonight. If they enact these deep cuts to Medicaid, as they are positioned not to extend these premiums, these tax credits, they are raising the cost of
So I have a question tonight. Who voted for that? Some of us are Democrats. Some of us are Republicans. Some of us are Independents. Some voted for one party; some voted for the other party. I get it. But who voted for that? Who voted for everybody's healthcare premiums to go up and their hospitals to close?
Here is what I know. The folks back in Georgia didn't vote for that. They voted for me, and they voted for Donald Trump, but they didn't vote for that.
Ordinary folks don't want this. Just ordinary, everyday people who barely pay attention to politics, they don't want this. Even a FOX News poll--and you won't often hear me say that--but even a FOX News poll from this month found that Americans don't support this ``Big Ugly Bill.'' This is systemic in the ways in which the people's voices have been squeezed out of their democracy. This is not just a healthcare fight, it is that. It is not just a fight for food security for SNAP, it is that.
But in the real sense, it is a fight for our democracy. Whose voice gets to be heard in this Chamber? That is what this is about, the character of the country.
Ordinary Americans don't want to do this to our children. That is why they need to know that 71 percent of all Medicaid enrollees in Georgia are children--71 percent. They are taking away healthcare from kids to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
Let me be clear. I am all for tax cuts. I believe working families deserve a tax cut, and I certainly don't want to see them face a tax hike this year. That is why I want to nearly double the child tax credit. I believe in tax cuts for hard-working families, for middle- class people, for working-class families.
Instead of doing that, instead of helping working-class families who are struggling now against a 10-percent tax on everything and rising costs, we are now burdening our children by adding $3 trillion to the debt. We are taking away healthcare from kids and then burdening them with the debt. We are engaged in Robin Hood in reverse, this body, of stealing from the poor in order to give to the rich; this massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.
This is socialism for the rich.
And when the people hear about it, guess what. They don't like it-- Democrats and Republicans and Independents. When the people hear about what is in this ``Big Ugly Bill,'' they don't like it.
And that is why the folks on the other side are trying their best to fast-track it. That is why they are trying to pass it, and they haven't even finished writing it. They are twisting themselves in knots, making their Members walk the plank under the threat of a primary to pass this ``Big Ugly Bill.''
The American people do not want to rob our children of food and healthcare and then burden them with trillions in debt to give billionaires and wealthy corporations another tax cut. The people do not want this bill.
So if the people do not want this bill, but they are trying to pass it, here is the question that you have to ask yourselves at home. You have to ask yourselves: Well, whom are they working for? Whom are they fighting for? Who do they think matters? Do you think they are working for you?
This is a moral moment and a budget is a moral document. We have been summoned to this moment, people of faith and people of moral courage who claim no particular faith at all. Maybe because I was here yesterday and 8 years ago for a similar fight with faith leaders; maybe because I am a preacher and it is Sunday and I have been here instead of church, I have especially been thinking about those of us who are people of faith, people whose lives are informed by Scripture, people of the Book.
And maybe those of us who have different politics but read from the same Book ought to spend some time together reading the Book because I do sometimes wonder--and I say this with all humility. None of us owns the truth. But if I am honest, there are days when I have to ask people of my faith tradition as a Christian, are we reading the same Book? The Book I know says: I was hungry and you fed me. I was sick, I was in prison, and you visited me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. In as much as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it unto me.
The Book that I love says: Learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of the destitute. Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and the needy.
My Book says: Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord and will be repaid in full.
The prophet Amos condemns those who ``buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.''
They sell the poor out and working-class people for cheap. And for those of us who have a vote in this moment, for my colleagues who are swinging on a moral dilemma, I hear the prophet Micah say: He has already told you what is good. What does the Lord require of you but that you do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.
May God be with our Nation and grant us grace, wisdom, and courage for this moment.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
Madam President, first, I want to thank my colleagues and, especially just now, my colleague from Georgia, for their work tonight, for their expression of what is at stake in this moment. And to Senator Warnock, I say thank you and amen.
I am here today because I am joining the majority of Americans who are deeply alarmed by this plan from the President and his congressional allies, a plan that will make life less affordable for more Americans.
When we return home for this Fourth of July, it would be nice to be able to tell our constituents that we came together and passed bipartisan legislation to help bring down costs for families. Instead, my colleagues who vote for this legislation will have to explain why, at a time when families' pocketbooks are strained, they chose to support a partisan bill to make American life even less affordable.
What will America look like once this bill takes effect? Millions of people will have lost their health coverage thanks to the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. More people won't be able to afford preventive care and cancer screenings, and more people will get sick. Healthcare premiums will surge for everyone because fewer people will have care, and the number of uninsured Americans will increase.
Rural hospitals will close their doors because they lost Medicaid reimbursements that help keep them afloat. More people, especially in States like mine, will have to make long car rides just to get to a hospital 50 miles away in those desperate moments when minutes feel like hours and hours like eternities.
Seniors will be thrown into grave peril because this bill threatens hundreds of billions in Medicare cuts.
And once this plan eviscerates food assistance programs, it will be much harder for families to afford to put food on the table at a time when groceries are already far too expensive.
Let there be no mistake, more families and children who today are being fed will go hungry, and all the while our children will be burdened with trillions more in debt.
In the name of what cause is all this done? Well, it is all to pay for tax breaks for billionaires. This bill will also make us an America where our people are less free.
In New Hampshire, during my time as Governor, we adopted Medicaid expansion with support from both political parties, and we balanced the budget at the same time. We understood that, with health, comes freedom: the freedom to work and provide for one's family; the freedom from disease and despair; the freedom that comes from--why do I even have to say this?--being alive. Granite Staters also understood that a great country like ours treats its people with great dignity. In America, we don't sacrifice the health of our
So what kind of country will we be with this bill? We will not only be less healthy, but we will be less prosperous and less free. In short, this bill is at odds with what we aspire to be as Americans.
It is also worth noting how remarkably out of step this bill is with the American people's plea to bring down costs. In a democracy like ours, theoretically, the people's representatives pass legislation that reflects the aspirations of the majority. I say ``theoretically'' because, clearly, that is not what is happening today. Indeed, according to the data from the Joint Economic Committee minority, if one combines this bill with the President's tariffs, then firefighters, truckdrivers, and teachers, for instance, will lose $470 or more next year while the top 0.1 percent--who are the people who earn about $4 million or more--will be $348,000 richer.
This bill would take away healthcare from tens of thousands of Granite Staters and would take a similar toll across the country. Indeed, in both Florida and Texas, the number of people who will lose their health insurance is greater than the entire population of New Hampshire--millions of people losing care with a stroke of a pen.
What have these people done to deserve that? All the American people are asking for is for us to help bring down costs. So the President and the Republicans in Congress take away their healthcare?
Sometimes in Washington, we are faced with bills that fail to fully meet the moment, to be sure, but it is rare to find legislation like this: a bill that makes life less affordable during a time when Americans of every political stripe are crying out for lower costs; a bill that seems as if it was drafted just to make a mockery of the wills and wishes of the majority of the people in this country.
Lately, many of my colleagues and some political pundits have been talking about this bill as if it were inevitable--a runaway freight train so vast that it cannot be stopped. In light of this inevitability, they suggest that some of the bill's deficiencies can just be overlooked. But, of course, this bill was not inevitable, nor is it now.
So let's be clear: Each and every Senator in this body has free will--God-given free will--which means that the measures in this legislation that gut Medicaid weren't written by mistake or by chance. We didn't arrive at this day with a vote on this terrible budget bill by accident. Let's not delude ourselves. We are only here because a majority in this body decided to ignore the majority of the country and make a series of decisions. The Republican majority decided to gut Medicaid. They decided to take away healthcare from millions. They decided to raise insurance premiums for the rest of us. They decided that closed hospitals were a risk worth taking. They decided that taking food away from hungry kids was acceptable. They decided that trillions more in debt was not a problem. The Republican majority decided that depriving the American people of all of these things and raising their costs were worth it just as long as they paid for another tax break for billionaires.
That is the bargain that this administration, along with my Republican colleagues, is forcing the American people to accept. Our people will be less healthy, and our kids will have more debt, but the President and billionaires like him will get a tax break.
Of course, part of what makes this bill so frustrating is it includes some individual provisions that I have spent years trying to pass into law. This bill includes provisions I support, some even that I authored, like strengthening the R&D tax deduction to support our entrepreneurs and a tax cut for families to make childcare more affordable. I also support this bill's provisions which would tackle our housing crisis by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which would bring down the cost of housing, as well as a provision making mortgage insurance tax deductible so that it is easier to buy a home. I support a bill with real tax cuts for the middle class and small businesses, unlike the token measures included in this bill.
If my Republican colleagues worked across the aisle to draft a bill that brought this bipartisan approach to other critical areas like healthcare and food assistance, I would vote for it. Instead, my colleagues chose to take these commonsense solutions hostage by linking every good idea to three bad ones, turning this into a purely partisan endeavor. So, yes, I am glad that some of these bipartisan provisions will be signed into law, but I regret that they aren't a part of a truly bipartisan effort because of the politics of division and destruction that President Trump brings to Washington.
I know that there are many areas of common ground with my Republican colleagues in this body, but it has become far too difficult to move forward on finding solutions when, at every turn, the President seems far more interested in demonizing and dividing rather than in bringing people together; in turning areas of agreement into weapons to force disagreement. Now, that is exactly the kind of cynical politics of division that does lasting damage to our families, to our economy, and to our democracy.
President Trump, likely, will get this bill passed. He may get enough of the Republican caucus to stand in line once again to pass it, even though my Republican colleagues know that budget analysts have added up the financial cost of this bill and have told them that it adds trillions upon trillions to our national debt, burdening our children's futures.
But, you know, as important as the debt is, it is not the only cost of passing this awful bill. There is another kind of cost, a cost not simply of dollars and cents. I shouldn't have to remind this administration and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle about the nature of this cost. They know it. Just to be clear, this tax break for corporate special interests and billionaires has a price--a price that can't be summed up in a budget line or written off during tax season--because when we debate healthcare in America, some dress up these discussions with words like ``reconciliation'' and ``program'' and ``discretionary spending,'' but what they are talking about is being sick and being healthy. What they are talking about, whether they want to admit it or not, is living and dying.
So how much does this bill cost?
The cost is that of millions of Americans losing their healthcare. The cost is of countless numbers of families feeling the pain of higher insurance premiums. The cost is a mother being forced to choose between paying out of pocket for her own care or paying for groceries for her kids. It is a price that is exacted in cancers that go undetected. It is exacted in chronic illnesses that go untreated. It is exacted in the healthcare challenges in our country that continue to go unaddressed because we spend all our energies simply trying to keep our heads above water in the floods of the President's own making.
The pricetag is more than dollars and cents. It includes the cost of losing more people from our workforce because they are too ill to work. It includes the gnawing pains of hunger and the slow toll of malnutrition that will come as food assistance programs are robbed. It includes the anguish of young parents who no longer know how they will make ends meet. It includes the lost hopes and deferred dreams of people held back by illness. It includes the cost of having to say more early good-byes.
What is the pricetag of this bill?
The price, in the end, is the health and freedom of millions of Americans. It is a price that will be paid because somewhere on the road that brought us here, here in President Trump's Washington, some people decided that the health of some child or her mother may be dear but that it doesn't carry the same weight that a bigger tax return for a billionaire does.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.
Madam President, the hour is late. I want to thank the Presiding Officer for being here.
I am glad to be here with my colleague from New Hampshire and my neighbor from New Mexico.
I want to thank the floor staff that is here tonight. And I would like to suggest--but it is not the purpose of my speech--that the next time Senators
Madam President, the last time that we were headed down this road, which was when Republicans were passing President Trump's 2017 deficit- exploding tax cut, it didn't take a mathematical genius to figure out what was about to happen. I told the Senate at that time that, as our debt grows, we will spend billions more not on schools, roads, and innovation but on interest costs. Worse, we were about to blow another hole in the debt without really helping the middle class, and 8 years ago, I said: On top of that, we know that, when deficits swell, as they surely will, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare will be sure to follow, further burdening working families struggling to make ends meet.
Well, here we are. That is exactly the story of this bill. Utterly predictable is this bill which massively increases our deficit when our children can least afford it. The Republican Senators who will be passing this bill tonight or tomorrow morning, if they do, know they are doing it when we have already hit a new milestone for the first time in American history.
Our interest payments exceed the amount that we spend on our national defense. For the first time, the American people, because of the irresponsibility of those in this Chamber, are going to pay $1 trillion in interest. That is a massive number. That is essentially the same as what we spend on Medicare; as what we spend on children and higher education together; as what we spend on housing, bridges, broadband, ports, and highways combined.
I want to be very clear tonight that over the years, Democrats and Republicans have pursued policies that have led to that $1 trillion in interest payments--there is no doubt about it--and it is worth thinking about what we could do if we hadn't made such fiscally irresponsible choices: expand the child tax credit, as my colleague from Georgia said; cut childhood poverty in half and hunger by a quarter; build a modern energy group to meet our expanding energy demands so Americans in cities and rural communities can enjoy affordable, reliable energy at home; establish a healthcare system that the American people deserve--a modern system that people in other rich, industrialized countries take for granted, a system that does not cost twice as much with worse outcomes like in the United States of America, the richest country in the world, that forces parents to choose between their children's prescriptions and school supplies and that exhausts the American people who, day after day after day, have to fight endless negotiations with their insurance companies just to keep their children covered; that constantly threatens rural hospitals and clinics with closures in this country. No other rich country in the world puts up with that craziness. And we are spending twice as much as any other country in the world to get worse healthcare, worse outcomes, and more scarcity.
Every Senator on this floor might make a different choice about the policies that they would enact, their preferred policies, but I doubt that there is anybody here who is willing to go home and defend the virtues of wasting $1 trillion of the American people's money on interest payments.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and outside groups like the Penn Wharton Budget Lab tell us that by the end of the next 10 years, we will have the highest debt ratio ever, eclipsing the debt our Nation had in the 1940s.
What was happening in the 1940s? That is when the ``greatest generation'' had borrowed money to defeat economic misery at home through the New Deal and European fascism by becoming the arsenal of democracy. Those were their receipts. Those were the receipts of a generation that understood its commitment to the next generation--to us.
When we contemplate from this broken Senate the patriotic accomplishments of the ``greatest generation,'' what has always seemed particularly egregious to me has been the tax policy Republicans have passed four times since Ronald Reagan passed it in 1981. Every single time, they made the same promises--every time. Look it up. They made the same promises that their trickle-down tax policy would drive economic growth, cut our deficit, pay for itself. Every time, including the recent Trump tax cut in 2017, these promises have been false. They have been false. That was 8 years ago. That wasn't a century ago. We know what the math is. Everybody in this room knows the deficit is far worse today than it was when Donald Trump passed those tax cuts.
President Trump has had a very rare thing happen, which is he got to take 4 years off and come back and be President. The effect of the tax cuts he passed the last time that he said were going to pay for themselves clearly have not. There is nobody in this Chamber who can deny that.
I always find it amazing, when I hear these promises, why people make them if they know they are so false--over and over and over again. I think the reason is that it is a way that politicians in Washington can avoid the objections that you could never get away with at home.
Imagine for a minute if there were a mayor in America, any mayor in any town--in Santa Fe, NM; or in Limon, CO; or in Los Angeles, CA--it doesn't matter--a Republican town or a Democratic town. Imagine if a mayor came to join you and said: This town is going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before.
That would worry you. That would worry me. I think our first question to that mayor would be: OK. That worries me. What are you going to spend the money on that you are going to borrow? Are you going to spend it on schools?
No.
Are you going to spend it on parks?
No.
Are you going to spend it on the water infrastructure that so many communities in New Mexico require? Are you going to spend it on the mental health crisis that our teenagers are facing because of our failure to address it? Are you going to spend it on infrastructure?
The answer to all those questions would be no.
What are you going to spend the money on, Mr. Mayor?
Well, the answer is, I am going to give tax cuts to the two richest neighborhoods in town and hope that those trickle down to everybody else.
That is the Republican tax policy.
There is a reason why no mayor in America has ever done that. There is no mayor in America who has ever pursued trickle-down economics because you would get run out on a rail. You would get run out on a rail if you went and said: We are going to borrow the most money that has ever been borrowed from our children to finance tax cuts for the richest neighborhoods in town.
It makes no sense. It is preposterous. Yet that has been the argument since Ronald Reagan first said that these tax cuts will be paid for, that the economy will grow, that there won't be a deficit.
There is a reason we are paying more than $1 trillion in interest today, and that is because our deficits are enormous.
Fortunately--and this is really important for the American people to understand--we still live in the strongest country in the world. We are in the world's richest economy. We have the most lethal military. Apart from our President, we have a national commitment to an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and low levels of corruption in our economy and in our society. We have unparalleled capital markets, cutting-edge innovation, and world-leading universities. We have all those things going for us partly because the folks who came before us invested in those things and built those things and tended those things.
But what we struggle with in our time is a sense amongst most Americans that they can't get ahead, that the American dream is further and further out of reach for themselves and for their families. In my view, that is the biggest challenge our country faces and in the face of this bill's ill-considered tax cuts and cuts to our healthcare system, which is going to throw millions of people off of their healthcare and make healthcare more expensive for everybody else.
By the way, what is the logic of that? The logic of that is that when you throw people off their healthcare, they end up going to the emergency room to take care of themselves and take care of their families, just as anybody would. That is the most expensive care that anybody could have. That expense is then put in our insurance policies, and all of us are going to pay more. You can't wish away people just because you throw them off health insurance.
When other countries in the world--other wealthy, rich countries in the world--have a system of insurance that basically guarantees healthcare and mental health care to their citizens, it is worth asking why we would throw our people off the not-so-great health insurance that they have. That is a good question. But it is particularly crazy when it just drives up the cost for everybody else.
We need to deeply think about the challenges that our country is facing today. It is more unequal. The top 1 percent own 30 percent of our Nation's wealth, and the bottom 50 percent own 2\1/2\ percent. The top 1 percent of Americans own 50 percent of the value of the stock market. The top 1 percent of Americans own 50 percent of the value of the stock market while the bottom 50 percent own just 1 percent of its value.
Something that is really affecting my State is that the Nation's median home price is now five times higher than the median family income. As a result, the average first-time home buyer is now 38 years old--38 years old--versus 29 just a generation ago. Reading scores in our Nation have hit a 20-year low. And perhaps most damning and perhaps most upsetting is that our lifespan has declined since the 1980s. We are now, on average, likely to die 6 years sooner than other people who live in wealthy countries around the world. If you are African American, your chance of dying is, on average, 12 years--12 years-- sooner than people living in the industrialized world.
If we don't shift course soon, we will be the first generation of Americans whose kids and grandkids will be worse off than we are. That has never happened before. We are on track for that to happen to our children.
Many young people today can't afford to live on their own, and they may never be able to afford a house. They can't afford healthcare or childcare. They can't count on a quality education for their children in too many parts of America. Some are really worried about whether they are going to be able to afford a child at all. If you haven't heard a family say that to you in your townhalls or in your meetings, you haven't been paying attention.
But instead of addressing any of these challenges, we are debating a bill tonight that will make the wealthiest Americans even wealthier and the poorest Americans even poorer--half a million of whom live in Colorado--while adding millions more to the debt, which working Americans are going to have to pay back. That is what this Republican trickle-down economics comes down to. No matter how you dress it up, that is what it comes down to.
Our generation has made some very bad choices when it comes to our children's future. This bill only makes matters worse for them. And all this debt will constrain the choices they are going to be able to make for themselves. That is a shame because, unlike us, perhaps they will aspire to follow in the footsteps of the ``greatest generation'' and build a country where lifespans are growing, not falling; where economic mobility is rising; where poverty and economic anxiety are falling; where energy exports are increasing and emissions are decreasing; where quality healthcare and childcare and education and affordable housing are abundant, not scarce.
It seems obvious to me that our child's ambitions should be ours as well. Unfortunately, tomorrow, the Republican majority may pass a bill that takes us further in the wrong direction. In its wake and in its wreckage, Americans who do feel an obligation to the next generation are going to have to fight even harder to fulfill our duty.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Madam President, today, we meet at the center of a great debate, at a crossroads that will determine the direction of the country for another generation. And this debate, this choice, goes to the heart of a central question that has been plaguing families in America over the last three decades but that is now just coming to the forefront.
And that question is this: If you are working hard in America, can you still earn a good living for yourself and your family? If you are working hard in America, can you still buy a home or pay your rent, buy your food and medicine, get the healthcare you need, afford fuel for your car, get a decent education, or go on a family vacation? And if the answer is no--and for all too many millions of people, the answer is no--what do we do about it?
When I was a kid, my father was in the clothing business. He was a traveling salesman, and he made $18,000 a year. On the strength of that single income, my parents bought our first home for $18,000. He made $18,000 a year, and my parents bought a home for $18,000. It was the American dream, and it came true for our family.
Today, I am a U.S. Senator. That, too, is part of the American dream that anything is possible in this country. But could anyone buy a home for the cost of the annual income even of a U.S. Senator? Not a chance in the world. An average home in California costs three or four times that much.
My kids are paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month in rent. Could they find a home for the cost of their annual income? There is even less of a chance of that.
And what about your grandkids? At the rate we are going, at the rate housing prices are rising, what chance will they have to afford a home at any income?
And, of course, it is not just a home. Healthcare costs are rising even faster. Millions of families are only one healthcare crisis away from failing, and it is not their fault. It is not their fault. They are working hard--harder than ever--and they can't keep pace with rising premiums, out-of-pocket costs, hospital stays, drug costs, and charges at the emergency room.
Energy prices are going up. It costs more to heat your home in the winter and a lot more to cool your home in the summer. Utility bills have been rising by double digits while incomes have remained comparatively flat. It is too much. It is too much.
Now, why is this coming to a head now? Why, when we are not in a great depression, not even a great recession--although, with Trump's destructive tariff wars, we may get there soon enough--why now? Why now is this coming to a head?
The answer is that people feel more squeezed than ever, more pressure than ever, more like a failure than ever because they are doing their best, working their hardest, and they are still hanging by a thread. And do you know something? It is not their fault. It is not their fault. They are doing everything they can to provide for their families, and it is just not enough.
It is not their fault, but it is someone's fault. It is someone's responsibility. There is someone who should be held accountable for the fact that this generation is the first to renege on a compact between generations that we would leave the country better off to the next generation than the one that came before.
And do you know who that someone is? It is us. It is us.
The world has changed, the nature of work has changed, and we have not changed with it. We have not kept pace. And in too many ways, through our policy failures, we have moved the country in the wrong direction.
And the question before us today is whether we continue to barrel down that track toward higher home prices, bigger healthcare costs, more hunger, and greater hardship, or whether we change direction--much too late, yes; requiring an even more profound course correction, certainly; but finally steer this country to a better quality of life for all of our citizens.
Is this bill that change in direction? Does it lead our country on a new path toward affordability and prosperity? The answer--the simple, terrible but clear-as-day answer--is no, it most emphatically does not. No, it does nothing to bring down costs. No, it does nothing to make it easier for your kids or mine to buy a house, pay their rent,
Donald Trump promised he wouldn't cut Medicaid, but this bill cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid. It is shredding the President's commitment made again and again. In January, the President said Republicans will ``love and cherish'' Medicaid. In February, he said, ``We are not going to touch it.'' Even a few weeks ago, the President said, ``We are not changing Medicaid. We are leaving it.''
But we see in the black and white in this text they released in the dark of night that that simply isn't true. This bill will result in millions losing their healthcare from cuts to Medicaid. We know that. The Republicans know that. Thom Tillis has made this point over and over again tonight, as have other Republicans in this body.
This bill will close down hospitals in the poorest counties and States. It will raise healthcare costs for families everywhere--and by the thousands of dollars. It takes food away from the hungry. It kills clean energy so that we have to rely on oil and gas for everything, enriching that industry and impoverishing the rest of us with higher prices at the pump.
It raises taxes on working families and the middle class, while lowering taxes on the very wealthy and corporations.
If you are in the top 0.1 percent of income earners, making more than $5 million a year, you will get a $346,000 tax cut. How is that fair? How is that right? And it borrows the money from our kids to pay for that $346,000 tax cut, to pay for the habits of really rich people.
Where is the fairness, the morality in that? When is enough enough?
My father was part of the ``greatest generation.'' We, it would appear, are part of the most selfish, and I am fed up with it. I am fed up with it.
What happened to any sense of responsibility in this generation? What happened to love of country?
Can we love our country and impoverish it? Can we love our children and grandchildren if we take from them only to give to ourselves?
In this bill, we borrow trillions from our kids, and for what? So the rich can have a bigger boat? So corporate CEOs can have more money? So a company can buy back more of its stock? So we can be richer than our neighbor while his neighbor has no home at all?
``The test of our progress,'' Franklin Roosevelt said in 1937, ``is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''
Last week, a landscaper in Los Angeles was tackled to the ground because he was undocumented. He is the father of three marines--three marines. When one of those marines was finally able to speak to his father after his detention, he had one ask of his son: Please go back to the worksite and finish the job.
That was his ask. That is the work ethic that has made this country great, not the ethic that brought him to the ground. Raising three marines, that is the patriotism that has made this country great, not the rancor that beat him while he lay there.
But if this bill is not the answer--and it most certainly is not--if this bill only makes matters worse, far worse, then what is the answer? What direction shall we go? How can we begin to make the country work for people once again?
Well, we can give instead of take. We can build instead of tear down. We can recapture once again the sense of possibility in this country. If Eisenhower was part of the generation that won the war and built the roads and highways, let us be the generation that wins the peace by creating the next giant boom in housing in America, making the investment necessary, tapping into the great potential of the government and industry working together, breaking down each obstacle in the way--millions and millions of new homes that my children can afford and your children.
Let us build new hospitals instead of closing them down and, in so doing, bring the cost of healthcare down with them. Let us train new doctors and nurses so it is not so expensive to visit them and new home healthcare workers to take care of us even as we take care of them.
Let us grow more food and feed more people at home and abroad and bring down the costs of our groceries. Let us thank our farmworkers, instead of chasing them through the fields to separate them from those they love.
None of this--none of this--is beyond our capacity. It may mean that we can't afford yet another tax break for the wealthy or a giveaway to the oil industry or a giveaway to any other industry and its corporate titans.
It may call for some sacrifice on our part, but a fraction of what our parents and grandparents gave to this country. It means that we pay more attention to our kids and their needs and less our own; that we once again show concern and compassion for our neighbor and remember that we were once strangers in a strange land; that we show humility about our own achievements and recognize that none of us got here on our own; that all of us can prosper without someone else being made to suffer--you know, the way it used to be; the way it could be once again.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Madam President, I heard several of my colleagues speak tonight about what this bill means for Americans all across America. Now, each of us has a responsibility to ask whether this bill meets the needs of the people that we are honored to serve.
Now, I grew up on a small farm, as many of you know, working the land, caring for animals, sometimes even cleaning barns. And I can tell you, this bill does not pass the smell test.
For New Mexicans, hard-working people, this bill does not help our families get ahead. New Mexicans work hard. Folks are not looking for a handout. New Mexicans are the type of people who would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it. It is just who we are, and I am proud of it.
But sometimes people fall on hard times. And I will remind you all that this could happen to any of us. You might need medical care. You might need help putting food on the table, maybe support to care for a loved one, or just want enough security to know that a job will be there for us.
Some claim that this bill will help Americans, which we know is not the truth because, from where I stand, there is very little in this legislation that helps hard-working New Mexicans.
Now, it is important that this debate is happening because now New Mexicans and people all across America can clearly see what is in this bill and what is not. As has been said time and time again this evening, the vast majority of this legislation benefits the ultrawealthy. The wealthiest 0.1 percent are getting over 250 grand back in their pocket. Can you believe this?
How many people might not make that in a lifetime? An extra $250,000 in their pockets, that is what this bill is about. Now, meanwhile, it does not help farmers; it does not support teachers or children.
Nothing for New Mexico seniors who rely on Medicaid SNAP, and nothing for New Mexicans who served our country and deserve our care in return.
New Mexicans are hard-working people who believe in the values of loving your neighbor, following what the Bible teaches us: Do unto others as you have them do unto you.
This bill goes against everything New Mexicans stand for. It is not honest; it is not caring; and it is not fair.
Now, I have heard my colleagues try to claim that this bill does not cut assistance. That is a lie. It is not true. This bill cuts more than a trillion dollars from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, for crying out loud. Senate Republicans are gutting the Affordable Care Act and ripping healthcare away from 17 million Americans.
Now a few of my colleagues across the aisle have spoken with some clarity, saying out loud what we all know to be true.
One Republican Senator warned about SNAP, about these cuts, saying:
Another Republican colleague said on Medicaid:
Now that same Senator went on to say that:
That is right. I wish more of them spoke with that clarity. At least a few of them are saying out loud what the rest of America is thinking.
Now is the time for more courage, though, the courage to put people first. My colleagues all have a chance to vote against this legislation. They all have a chance to vote for amendments that will say: Hands off Medicaid. Don't cut those nutrition programs that one Senator said are going to hurt people if we don't watch out.
This bill takes food from the mouths of New Mexican children and takes care away from New Mexicans who are sick. It is not just New Mexico. These cuts will hurt people in every State.
My Republican colleagues, to lock up one more vote, offered something called the Polar Payoff--a carve-out for one State. Now, look, these carve-outs are an admission that this bill will leave people hungry and without care--plain and simple. Otherwise, why would they want a carve- out for their State? Why was this carve-out added?
Because this scam of a bill cuts funding for rural hospitals and the programs that feed children and families in need. For our rural communities out there, for the farmers and ranchers who grow our food, this bill will hurt your bottom line while closing rural hospitals, closing rural grocery stores.
For families who rely on SNAP, this bill means less food on the table and more children going to bed hungry, all while making healthcare, especially emergency care, harder to access. That is what this bill does to hard-working Americans. And I am not even mentioning the Americans who currently have healthcare but will no longer be able to afford it because of this bill.
Those of you watching at home tonight who do not think this impacts you, it just might. Earlier this week, I had the honor of speaking with a healthcare worker from Las Cruces, Julee. Julee traveled all the way from New Mexico to Washington, DC, to tell Congress not to mess with her families' Medicaid.
Like many of her colleagues, she had a story to share. Now, Julee's son received mental health care through Medicaid. When that coverage was cut, Julee lost her son. Soon after, her daughter was diagnosed with a serious condition that required immediate care. Now, without Medicaid, her daughter may not have survived either. Just think about that. Let it sink in.
New Mexicans understand the responsibility of looking after family. Like so many families in New Mexico and across the country, I grew up helping to take care of my grandparents. Grandma Nestora and Grandpa Celedon, my dad's parents.
Now, when my other grandparents Grandpa Luis and Grandma Cleotilde were victims of a terrible car accident, I watched my mom, my uncles, my aunts, and my cousins show what grace looks like, what love feels like, what compassion really means.
Now this bill is a direct attack on those values, values of helping one another and shared sacrifice. There is no shared sacrifice in this bill, only more handouts for the wealthy.
There is nothing in this bill that shows that we are all looking out for our neighbors across America. And like so many Americans, I am so deeply concerned about the pricetag. This bill would add more than $3 trillion to the national debt.
To people watching, this is not just a number. It affects your everyday life--higher interest rates. Think about your credit cards, your car loans, your mortgages if you are fortunate to have one. This bill is going to make your life more expensive. It is a total betrayal of our constituents.
So to the American people: Hear me when I say, keep speaking. You have done it before. The American people--all of you that spoke up--you helped stop the sale of our public lands. You made your voices impossible to ignore.
Now, this bill is not the law of the land yet. But if we stay silent, it will be. So keep organizing, keep calling, and keep showing up because part of our responsibility as American citizens is to protect one another, to stand by one another, to treat others the way that we want to be treated, the Golden Rule. It is not hard.
We all have a responsibility to stand up when something this dangerous threatens our neighbors, our values, and our future.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. President, I rise today to lift up the fact that this reconciliation bill will do real harm to countless American families. It is not theoretical or hypothetical. Families are hurting right now: the opioid crisis that has ravaged large parts of my State, the mental health crisis that people across this country are so concerned about and are begging for help about, and so many other challenges that every single family knows the fear of a health crisis.
Like Susan, a mother I met at a townhall down in Egg Harbor--a townhall that was part of a series of townhalls that I did trying to highlight the challenges that so many families are facing--and in this crowded room full of hundreds of people, a woman named Susan shared her story, a mom of a 24-year-old son with Down syndrome.
They use Medicaid to be able to cover his care. She broke down at the weight of her fear and worry for her child, something a lot of us can relate to.
She said to me that this is the face of Medicaid. As I went over to give her a hug, I remember she said: ``It's real.''
And it is real, and I know everyone in here knows that. I know because offices on both sides of the aisle are getting the same calls. Our phone systems broke down because of the overwhelming volume of people calling and literally begging--begging--us not to do this, begging us to protect Medicaid so their kids can see the doctors, begging us not to cut SNAP benefits so their students could have access to healthy food.
It is a humbling experience seeing a parent begging for the resources to take care of their sick child. Yet, as I look around, I see far too many people rushing through this process to get it done with little care about the resulting impact it will have, generational damage that will be done.
While we are rushing through, barreling through without the ability to properly debate this, I want you to know the people of New Jersey, the people of this country, this budget represents an abandonment by their government, and this will hurt everyone we are supposed to be helping.
Some of the people that could be impacted the most are people within the disability community, hundreds of thousands of people in New Jersey with disabilities that rely on Medicaid for coverage, over 15 million across our country, including a man named Tom Spadaro, a disability advocate in Ocean County, NJ, who joined me for a townhall.
After a gun accident when he was 11, Tom is a total quadriplegic, dependent on a ventilator and others. Medicaid helped him go to school, then college, and in his own words has given him dignity.
When talking about this bill that we are debating here today he said:
I want his words to echo through this Chamber today for everyone to hear. If this budget passes, families in every single State across this country will feel these cuts long after the media and the Trump administration have decided it is time to move on and ``get over it.''
A cancer patient doesn't just ``move on'' when they have to delay treatment because they have lost insurance coverage, when a family has to upend their lives to become caregivers to their parents because they can't afford elder care, when a hospital closes and the new closest emergency room is hours away after the child is in an accident and needs help now, not in 5 hours, they won't ``get over it.''
America will feel this long after Donald Trump is no longer in the White House, and they will remember what has happened to their lives because of it.
Now there are some people listening who might not think that this is going to affect them, but these cuts to healthcare in this bill are so dramatic, it is going to have an impact that reverberates all throughout our communities.
I talked to a hospital leader in New Jersey who said that these cuts could be so devastating for their revenue because of how much they get through Medicaid reimbursements, that they are not sure that they are going to be able keep their doors open, a hospital not certain if they can keep their doors open.
This is not the only story like this across my State, across the country, whether it is rural hospitals or it is suburban or urban. We are going to have a lot of challenges that are going to reverberate beyond just those on Medicaid. It is going to affect every single one of us and raise prices at the same time.
Losing that critical care in communities not only abandons people in their time of most need, but it leaves a tragic ripple effect on others and other hospitals.
So today I am putting forward an amendment to this bill that would stop this from happening and directly take out the parts of this bill that would force hospital closures and reduce access to affordable healthcare for so many across this country.
In no reality should we be helping billionaires send their rockets to outer space while turning people away at hospitals. And yet, this is the reality we find ourselves in, deciding how much care is acceptable to take away from families across New Jersey to fit a budget cut or how many patients can be turned away from lifesaving medication just so the wealthy can have a nice tax break.
A doctor from Frenchtown shared some profound words with my office.
She said:
Well what does it say about our Nation as we are having this debate that could very well take a trillion dollars out of Medicaid; about those who need the care the most as if they are just expendable, as if they are just some remainder on the equation of capitalism that is just pushed to the wayside?
As just an inevitability, as a shrug of the shoulder of our society to say: I am sorry what happened to you, without a care and an extended arm and a hand to reach out and pull them up.
Let's be very clear. This bill will cause prices to drive up. In New Jersey alone, over 454,000 families will see higher costs in premiums, according to the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance, which is why I am introducing an amendment to make sure this bill wouldn't raise these costs by striking provisions that would increase premiums or out-of-pocket costs under Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and some private insurance marketplaces too.
We cannot allow billionaires to get richer while working families are seeing drastic increases to their premiums or out-of-pocket costs, costs to keep their children healthy as we deal with the worst measles epidemic in decades, costs to afford their kids medicine while we see our government attacking science and fact, making parents have to work that much harder to keep their children safe.
With all the challenges we are dealing with right now, it is painful to think through what will happen if this bill goes into effect and the fact that these healthcare cuts will increase our gaps and worsen conditions for our vulnerable communities, including children. If we can't stand up for them, for our children, who are we willing to stand up for?
And as I said at the beginning, every family has a healthcare story. Everyone has felt overwhelmed in the face of sickness and injury. Just a year ago, my father took a fall. I got the call while I was on the campaign trail. I rushed down to the hospital. But even after the surgery, what we learned is there was an even more debilitating challenge that we faced, a cognitive decline as my father is descending into dementia.
I just spent Father's Day weekend with my father, the entire weekend, but it was in the emergency room as he had twice fallen in 2 days--two separate trips to the emergency room.
My family is overwhelmed right now. We struggle to think through his needs that go far beyond what we can be able to provide, goes far beyond what Medicare can provide.
And it is not just my father and my family. We have failed seniors. We have failed as we have failed to plan and create a place for elder care in this country that preserves a foundation of dignity and decency for everybody.
And when you are in the trenches fighting for your own life or gripping the hand of a loved one struggling, the last thing you want to think about is worrying if you are eligible for this treatment or that.
You want to be able to provide what it takes for your loved one to survive, to go a little further, spend a little more time on this planet with us, and to grow our love deeper.
When we think about that and then we ask ourselves, well, why is this bill happening, why are these cuts happening, it is not to bring down the deficit. Instead, it is going to balloon the deficit by trillions of dollars. Who among us in this country think that the problems that we face as a Nation is because the wealthiest among us don't have enough?
The distrust in government right now, it is not because politics isn't doing enough to help the most well-off in our country, the billionaires and the millionaires.
I ask my colleagues to find the courage to do the right thing. I want to bring us back to 2017 in this very Chamber as Senators gathered to decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act, which was, at the time, hanging by a thread.
Many of my colleagues here in this Chamber were also on the floor at that time. I was not. I was a regular citizen, angry at what I was seeing unfolding, watching it on my phone.
A citizen that felt so detached from what was happening in this Chamber, I remember thinking to myself, How could the Senate be seriously considering doing such harm to this country, to so many Americans by trying to gut preexisting condition protections, the Affordable Care Act, so much others? I asked myself: Am I missing something? Am I missing information to understand why it is that this is even happening?
And we saw rushed conversations, and we saw people running back and forth. And we also saw Senator John McCain step up and signal with his arm that he did not stand for this. Senator McCain's vote was a rare moment of doing what you know is right even when you are surrounded by noise telling you it is wrong.
It is surreal now finding myself on the floor of the Senate in a similar moment in our own Nation's history with so much on the line with this vote, and I look around this Chamber and yet again think the exact same questions from 8 years ago, How can the Senate seriously be considering gutting care for so many?
And now with the benefit of being here, the conversations and the information, I am still left with this question of, Am I missing something?
How is it that such an esteemed body that is meant to protect the American people, in this Chamber where so many decisions have been made to protect the American people, that we are on the cusp of doing something that will do generational damage to so many American families?
This vote before us seems as surreal and reckless from within this Chamber as it does from outside. But while the problem is the same, so is the solution. It is about courage--the courage John McCain had; the courage that so many of my constituents have.
So many people have called and shared their personal stories--stories about their families' health they probably had never told anybody, but they feel so desperate right now to do something that they are willing to open themselves up, be able to pull back the curtain of the dangers and the pain that they have endured, to be able to try to do anything to stop this bill from hurting Americans. That is courage.
And it is courage about standing up against the big money and the special interest, and sometimes it feels insurmountable.
And I say to my colleagues here today that you won't be remembered by whether or not you passed this bill on President Trump's timeline or if you feigned concern about constituents just to be able to stab them in the back later. You will be remembered by your courage to stand up and say no. You will be remembered by your courage to speak out for the people--not just a few who have paid, but for all of us.
You will be remembered in the same way as our former colleague was remembered by what he did 8 years ago. I urge you to remember that this job is bigger than all of us--bigger than any one man, any one party. It is about using our vote and our courage to make lives better for those that we represent.
History and the American people are watching. You still have time. We still have power. I still believe in this Chamber and believe it can be a force for good. Let us use it for the children, for the disabled, for those not in this room.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, I too rise in opposition to the reconciliation bill before us, but before I get to my objections over the substance of this historic attack on working and middle-class families, I want to speak for a minute as the ranking member of the Rules Committee, and I need to address how Republicans are abusing the process to get here.
They are breaking the Senate rules to hide the true cost of the bill. For the second time in just 6 weeks, the Republican majority is going nuclear on the Senate rules. And they are doing it with the same purpose: to avoid the 60-vote threshold of the filibuster in order to pass a very unpopular agenda.
Now, I know oftentimes, we are advised against getting into ``process'' because most people may not care about process or understand process. But in this particular case, it serves to underscore the significance of the damage that this bill represents, the procedural lengths to which the Republican majority is going to try to get this done.
And I do have to say it is a little surprising, because it was just in May that Leader Thune said--Leader Thune unequivocally said:
If you go back to January, he was asked about this because folks kind of had a sense that this might be coming. He said then about overruling the Senate Parliamentarian:
But now Republicans are trying to do exactly that, to hide behind the technical language of Senate procedure to harm working families.
And like I said, it is not the first time. Just last month, Republicans voted to override the very plain language of the Congressional Review Act, and they voted to overrule the Parliamentarian to repeal California's Clean Air Act standards with a simple majority vote.
Fast forward to today, they are running the same play, this time with trillion-dollar consequences, not just air quality and public health consequences.
See, colleagues and folks watching at home, budget reconciliation is the most powerful, expedited procedure statute on the books. You can do a lot with a simple majority and avoid the filibuster, but you have to do it by the rules of reconciliation.
But today, the Republican majority wants to extend trillions of dollars of tax cuts for President Trump's billionaire friends and extend those tax cuts permanently. That is not just terrible, terrible policy, it is against the Senate rules. The Congressional Budget Act says clearly that reconciliation bills cannot increase the debt beyond 10 years.
Now, it doesn't take a Nobel Prize-winning economist to know that a permanent trillion-dollar tax cut would do exactly that. And so once again, following the same playbook they did last month, the majority is going to twist the rules to try to find a way.
They are, again, ignoring the guidance from the Parliamentarian's office that doesn't fit their agenda. And they are setting yet another new precedent for this body not only to continue to overrule the Parliamentarian, but to ignore adding trillions of dollars of costs under the ``current policy baseline.''
As we did during the Clean Air Act debate last month, I and my Democratic colleagues will once again remind our Republican colleagues that sooner or later, Democrats will be back in the majority. By then, the American people will have felt the pain of this bill, but we will make sure that they understand just how hard you tried to work to hide it from them.
Democrats will not let the American people forget what Senate Republicans do this week.
Now, on to the substance of budget reconciliation. How many times have we heard the Trump administration these past few months say they are focused on fraud? Waste? Abuse?
Now, these are the buzz words that they turn to when trying to bat away questions or when Americans are trying to get clarity on whether the lifesaving services that they depend on are about to get cut.
But in reality, what we are seeing happen this week is one of the biggest acts of fraud in American history playing out right before our very eyes with the bill under debate today. And it is past midnight, so we are in Monday, so I can still say today. Donald Trump and his billionaire allies are literally stealing--stealing--from working families in order to reduce the amount of taxes they would have to pay, literally robbing from the poor to give to the rich.
For anyone really wondering whether they would actually do that, we know they will because they have done it before. In 2017, during the first Trump Presidency, Republicans seemed fine saying they could afford hundreds of billions of dollars in permanent tax cuts for large corporations. I remember the arguments back then. ``This is going to grow the economy,'' they said. ``In time, it will reduce the debt,'' they said. That didn't happen.
So today, now, they are arguing that we can't afford programs that keep kids from going hungry? We can't afford the programs that keep lights on in emergency rooms? It is outrageous.
In 2025, so many working families are struggling--struggling to keep up with the rising costs from Trump's chaotic tariff wars, with prices going up for groceries and other everyday goods. Many are working long hours and still struggling to make ends meet or to afford care for their loved ones.
I get it. I have been there. Colleagues, as I have shared with you before, I am the proud son of working-class parents who came to the United States from Mexico in the 1960s. I will remind you that for 40 years, my father worked as a short-order cook and my mom cleaned houses. On those modest salaries, they raised my sister, my brother, and I in the proud working-class community of Pacoima, CA. And I remember what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck. I know how unnerving it can be, for example, when the car broke down, and you listened and witnessed your parents' debate because, on the one hand, maybe they couldn't afford the cost of repairing the car right away, but they also realized that they couldn't afford to not fix the car because they had to get to work.
I know that there are so many Americans in communities like the one I grew up in that aren't looking for handouts. That is not what we are arguing or debating in this bill. Americans just want a fair chance to work hard and provide for their families. There is pride and dignity in working hard and providing for families. That is part of the American dream. People just want a fair playing field. In a country with as much promise and profit as the United States of America, that shouldn't be too much to ask for.
But not only would the Republican budget reconciliation bill be one big handout for the wealthiest Americans, it would actually make life harder for working families in order to pay for it. That is wrong, and it is cruel.
At its very core, just like Trump did in 2017 with the help of Republicans in Congress, this bill is fundamentally about one thing and one thing only: cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans and big corporations. How else do you explain the fact that the top 0.1 percent will see a tax cut of more than $250,000 a year, while millions of American households will actually see a reduction in their annual income or take-home pay? That is because to pay for the massive handouts to the wealthy, Republicans are gutting healthcare and cutting services that so many working families depend on, and they are twisting themselves into knots in order to cut around $1 trillion in healthcare--cuts that would leave 16 million Americans without health insurance. We are talking about seniors.
These devastating cuts, by the way, will also close rural hospitals around the country, including in California, where so many are already struggling just to keep the doors open.
And for folks listening to the debate thinking that ``well, if I am not on Medicaid, then this may not apply to me; this isn't going to hurt me,'' let me remind you that if your local hospital that relies on Medicaid dollars is forced to cut services or cut staff or even close its doors as a result, then, yes, you, too, will be hurt.
But the bill doesn't stop there. In this bill, Republicans cut SNAP, nutrition assistance, that critical lifeline that so many count on to literally feed their families. How much more cruel can you get?
But wait, there is more. Republicans are also rolling back the historic progress we have made investing in our transition to a clean energy economy, targeting the millions of clean energy jobs that are fueling innovation and helping us stay ahead of China. The cuts to clean energy that Republicans are making in this bill will lead to higher energy costs, higher electricity bills for so many families.
I am reminded that this last November, so many voters went to the polls and voted, hoping for lower prices. They were desperate and looking for relief, and that is what motivated their votes. But this bill does the opposite.
So I have to wonder, for my Republican colleagues who are supporting this measure, who was it that you are fighting for? Did any of you really come to Congress to take food away from the hungry? to take care away from sick children? What are you proposing be done here?
Now, I have seen Republicans go back and forth on this bill for months now, I am sure trying to decide just how much they can try to get away with, and I have heard some of the arguments that they plan to make to justify voting for this bill. Some of them will argue that we need this bill because we need to reduce the deficit. Talk about misleading. This bill adds trillions--yes, trillions--of dollars to our Nation's debt. So even when they try to twist the numbers and come up with the funny math, it doesn't even result in deficit reduction. And do you know how you can tell? Because the Republicans included a $5 trillion increase to the debt limit in this bill. If the bill and the cuts included in the bill indeed reduced the deficit, as they claim it does, they wouldn't have needed to raise the debt limit in the process.
So let's be clear. Republicans who are voting for this bill know full well it will hurt so many of their constituents. That is why behind closed doors you have Republicans handing out flyers that show just how devastating Medicaid cuts will be in States represented by Republicans. Or we hear them discussing the burden SNAP cuts will have on State and local governments. But because the leader of their party wants to sign this bill to celebrate the Fourth of July this year, many of them will vote yes.
But I will ask again: Who is this bill in service of? Who are you standing up for? Who are you fighting for?
I will tell you who I am fighting for. I am fighting for people like Jesus Acosta from San Diego, a home care provider who in 2016 became his mother's full-time care provider when she was tragically hit by a car and became disabled. Jesus can't hold a full-time job and carry all the responsibilities of looking after his mother, so for both Jesus and his mother, Medicaid has been a lifeline. I am fighting for him.
I am fighting for people like Tina Ewing-Wilson in the Inland Empire, who remembers what it was like the last time her Medicaid benefits were cut. Tina struggles with seizures and developmental disabilities and requires care 24/7. But when the great recession hit and Medicaid cuts followed, Tina knew she could only afford her care by offering free room and board to caregivers--caregivers who went out to abuse drugs and alcohol and took advantage of her financially. Tina is terrified of that possibly happening again if these Republican cuts to Medicaid impact her. I am fighting for her.
I am fighting for the families I met at Rady Children's Hospital, where over half of all patients are covered by Medicaid.
I am fighting for the nurses and the caregivers who fear for their patients. They care for their patients, but they are fearing for their patients because of these proposals.
I am fighting for every parent across the country who is working their tail off to put food on the table for their children but every now and then may need a helping hand.
If you see these Americans, if you have constituents with similar experiences in Your States and still think they should have less of our help, not more, then I guess we came to Congress for different reasons.
If you have seen so many corporations' profits soaring and the wealth inequality in our country growing and think that billionaires need more tax relief, then I guess we came to Congress for different reasons.
If, this week, you will vote to rip these critical lifelines away from millions of Americans because you somehow think it is the right political calculation, then surely we came to Congress for different reasons.
Colleagues, it is crystal clear. I urge you to vote no on this bill and stand with me, stand with us, stand up for working families. That is what I plan to do.
I yield the floor.
