Legislative Session
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will resume consideration of S. 2296, which the clerk will report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
On page S6805, September 29, 2025, second column, the following appears: A bill (S. 2296) authorizing appropriations for fiscal year 2026 for military activities of the Department of Defense
The online Record has been corrected to read: A bill (S. 2296) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2026 for military activities of the Department of Defense
year, and for other purposes.Pending:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
Mr. President, the Chaplain, in his opening prayer, mentioned something about the shutting down of the government. It would be a good opportunity for me to follow on that and say that it costs money to shut down the government and costs money to open up the government.
The government is supposed to protect and serve the American people. You can't do that if you are shut down. I hope we can avoid it.
Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about the agricultural economy.
There are many big issues facing our Nation's farmers this season. There is stress in the grain-producing areas of the United States. That is true of my State of Iowa.
Stress comes from the fact that farmers are losing $1.10 a bushel on corn and soybeans about $2 a bushel. Stress comes not only from low prices for their products but high input costs, uncertainty in the international market, particularly the issue of tariffs. Then, also, we have the issue of high interest rates, market consolidation, and I suppose you can go on.
Today, I would like to focus on high input costs that farmers will be paying this season.
The average production costs for farmers are down only 3 percent since their very high peak in 2022. Meanwhile, corn prices are down 50 percent in the same period. To put it plainly, many farmers will be lucky if they break even this fall. Those words ``break even'' is not possible just because of price. If they break even, it is only because of the expectant bumper crops that we will have at least throughout the Midwest that I know about.
In response to the farmers' concerns about the market concentration and changes in anti-dumping and countervailing duty rates, I introduced the Fertilizer Research Act to shed light on the fertilizer industry.
The issue of ag inputs has become a large enough problem that last week, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Justice announced a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on agricultural antitrust issues. I am certain many farmers are glad to see these developments, but they need more immediate relief. This will become more of an issue as the harvest progresses.
My message is, as I see it from my State of Iowa, it is beginning to look like the 1980s' agriculture depression all over. Congress was too slow to respond in the 1980s. Thousands of farmers went out of business in the 1980s. That should concern all of us because with only 2 percent of the people producing all the food for the 98 percent, we can't let the destruction of the family farmer happen in 2025 like it did in the 1980s.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, the government is on the verge of a Democrat-caused shutdown, a shutdown of the Government of the United States of America.
Senator Schumer has sent us a ransom note. It is not about a negotiation; it is about a shakedown. That is what we are facing here today in the U.S. Senate. Schumer's ransom note, it is not about keeping the government open; it is about caving to the far left, the radical wing of his party. It is pure politics; it is political theater; and every Democrat in this body knows it.
This afternoon, my colleagues are going to be meeting at the White House with the President of the United States. The American people deserve to know what the Democrats are demanding. So let's take a look at this trillion-dollar demand note.
They are demanding more than a trillion dollars in new spending to keep the government open for just 4 weeks. They want permanent new spending to continue the Biden COVID bonus payments.
If you could believe it, they want sanctuary cities to continue to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants. At the same time, they threaten to defund the Border Patrol.
They want to send billions of dollars to foreign countries, but they want to slash billions of dollars to help rural hospitals right here in America. That is what the Democrats are proposing in their ransom note.
They want to subsidize free healthcare for people who refuse to work, who are working-age individuals and are healthy and ought to have a job. Yet they threaten the paychecks of the people whose job it is to keep our country safe.
They demand this far-left wish list or else, they say, they are going to shut down the government at midnight tomorrow.
The biggest scam in this ransom note is the COVID-era Biden bonus payments. Democrats are demanding $400 billion to continue these subsidies forever. Let's remember that Democrats created these Biden bonus COVID subsidy payments during COVID in 2021. It was part of their reckless tax-and-spending bill. They passed it when they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House.
At the time that Biden started these bonus payments, most people realized that COVID was already behind us, but that didn't stop them. Democrats extended the payments again in 2022, and they set the expiration date for December of 2025. That is about 3 months from now.
Democrats promised at that time, when they put them into place, that the Biden COVID bonus payments would be temporary. They weren't intended to last forever. Now the Democrats, in their ransom note to the Republicans and to President Trump, say they want these temporary payments to go on forever.
I have here the House report that came out on this 2021 reckless tax- and-spending bill. It is called ``American Rescue Plan of 2021.'' This is a report of the Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, H.R. 1319, dated February 24, 2021.
Instead of going through the whole thousand-page document and bringing it here and throwing it on the floor, which is where it belongs, I copied pages 215 and 216. What does it say about these bonus payments? They say right here, it applies ``during the public health emergency.'' The public health emergency is over. And it says in the payments, when you turn to the next page, they would go ``temporarily''--``temporarily.'' That is their word, not mine. Well, COVID is over. Joe Biden lost. Democrats are in the minority. These Biden COVID bonus payments, they need to go away as well.
They were just one more part of a big government giveaway, and now Chuck Schumer is here demanding that we make these bonus payments permanent. To me, ``temporary'' means ``temporary.'' That is what the Democrats are demanding just to keep the government open for 4 short weeks. It is preposterous.
Twelve years ago, in 2013, America faced another shutdown. At that time, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut sent out a press release-- 2013, 12 years ago. In his press release, Senator Murphy of the minority from Connecticut said this:
He went on to say--
He is not here today to hear those words, but his party needs to recognize that is exactly what they said 12 years ago. And, today, Democrats like Senator Murphy are doing the very thing that he condemned in his press release 12 years ago.
Stunningly, the Democrats want to eliminate, of all things, the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund. This is the fund that Republicans created to keep rural hospitals open.
I am a doctor. I practiced medicine in Wyoming for more than 20 years. I know what affordable, reliable, quality care means to our communities. They are lifelines to small communities.
Yet, yesterday, on ``Meet the Press,'' the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said rural hospitals are closing. So he wants to put the noose around their neck. This makes it worse. He is threatening, as part of his demand, to eliminate the $50 billion set aside for rural hospitals in America.
Last week, I was at home in Wyoming. I attended a ribbon cutting in Pinedale for a new hospital. This is the first hospital ever in Sublette County, WY. The nearest hospital is 85 miles away. There is another one 100 miles away. Depending on, in the winter, which roads are open, people in that community had to either drive 85 or 100 miles seeking healthcare.
This is going to help the communities in Pinedale. It is going to save lives. It matters to those people.
Yet the ransom note from Senator Schumer and the Democrats would shut it down, prevent all of these rural hospitals that are struggling that we have provided for in our comprehensive economic plan that we passed in July. Schumer wants to pull the plug on all of it. It is part of their bill. It is part of the ransom note. It is what the Democrats are trying to do.
Let's be honest. The Democrats have a political problem. The far left, their radical wing, is demanding a shutdown of the government. Their caucus is divided. The American people overwhelmingly want the government to remain open to provide vital services to the people. They know that it costs
What we have here is a clean, bipartisan, continuing resolution to fund the government for the next 7 weeks. The House of Representatives has already passed it with a bipartisan vote, and it keeps the government open for 7 weeks at the current funding levels. So it doesn't cut anything.
It says: Let's just continue to work on appropriations bills. It gives Republicans and Democrats an opportunity to work on the budgeting for next year, the appropriations process, to keep the government open for the next year. President Trump is ready to sign it. It is here before the Senate, and it is time to pass it.
Senator Schumer has repeatedly bragged that Democrats never shut down the government when they were in the majority. I would remind the minority leader today that 13 times under Joe Biden, the Senate passed a clean continuing resolution to keep the government open. We should do the same right now. Senator Schumer ought to remember those 13 times. Today should be no different. If this government shuts down--and it should not--it will clearly be a Schumer shutdown.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic whip.
Mr. President, the Senator from Wyoming is a friend of mine, really. And though we may disagree on some political issues, I greatly respect him and am glad to call him a colleague. But we do disagree on this point that he just made, and it is a very important disagreement because it affects every family in America.
The decision was made, in the big beautiful budget bill by Donald Trump, to cut $1 trillion out of Medicaid. Medicaid is a program which helps people who have limited income have health insurance. It also takes care of your mother and grandmother when they are in the nursing home. It is a critical element of funding healthcare in America, and the Republicans cut $1 trillion out of it.
If you go to the hospitals in Illinois, some of them are great hospitals, others do great things, but you will find that the hospitals that struggle to survive are ones that have more Medicaid patients than paying insurance patients. It is a tougher margin, and many of them worry about it. And the notion of cutting $1 trillion out of this program worries me.
Don't take my word for it. Ask the Illinois Health and Hospital Association or even, if there is one--I am sure there is--the Wyoming Hospital Association what the impact of cutting $1 trillion out of Medicaid reimbursement is going to be: not good, particularly in rural areas.
Senator Barrasso made reference to his situation in Wyoming. In the State of Illinois, we have plenty of these rural hospitals, and if one closes, it means your pregnant wife who goes into labor now has to drive 70 miles instead of 20 for that delivery. I would hate to have to go through that. Yet that is what is going to happen. So the position we are taking is that that kind of cut from Medicaid is going to hurt hospitals and hurt people across America.
Secondly, there is a tax credit available for people in middle-income categories to buy health insurance. It is part of the Affordable Care Act, which was the Barack Obama plan that extended more health insurance coverage to America than we had ever had in our history.
How important is health insurance to you?
I had a personal experience as a law student at Georgetown. I had decided I couldn't wait, and I asked a young lady to marry me, and she did. And my second year in law school, we learned that God was sending us a little baby, and we were so happy about it. And she arrived with her share of difficulties.
I had no health insurance--none. What do you do--as a student with a wife and a baby, and the baby is sick--when you have no health insurance? Well, Children's Hospital here in Washington, DC, brought us into the so-called charity ward, and we waited to see who would walk through the door with the name ``Doctor So-and-so'' to take care of my daughter.
I never felt more inadequate in my life, as a father and a husband, than not having health insurance. We got through it. She got through it too and lived a good life.
But the point was there were moments when I worried that I couldn't provide the basics for my baby because I didn't have health insurance, and 15 million Americans will lose their health insurance because of this Republican budget that I just referred to, the big beautiful budget. Fifteen million will lose health insurance. I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
So when the Democrats say there are healthcare issues that are part of this debate on funding the government, that is what we are talking about, keeping these hospitals open--critical hospitals in the inner city, as well as in rural areas--making sure that people have their health insurance.
And there is one third element I would add that I don't think will be able to be negotiated: medical research.
Did you ever hear of the National Institutes of Health? Why, sure you have. It is the best medical research Agency of any government in the world.
I went to the NIH about 12 years ago and met with Dr. Francis Collins, an amazing man, who was head of the NIH, and I said to him: I really believe in what you do. Your research in cancer and heart disease and so many other things makes a difference. What can I do to help?
Well, he said, thank you for asking. There have been some people who have done remarkable things.
I said: Oh, I remember. There was a bipartisan coalition, a few years back, that doubled the budget in medical research for NIH.
I said: I wish I could say I could do that again, but I don't think I can. What can I do?
He said: Give me and this Agency 5 percent real growth each year in medical research, and we will light up the scoreboard. We are so close--so close--to finding cures and new drugs in so many areas that if you can give us consistent research, it will make a difference.
I came back to the Senate. I sat down with my friends on both sides of the aisle. Roy Blunt, a Republican Senator from Missouri, was a leader in this effort. Lamar Alexander, a Republican Senator from Tennessee, was another leader. And Patty Murray is still serving as head of the Appropriations Committee and is one of the best when it comes to medical research.
We put our heads together, and over the span of 10 years, the budget for NIH medical research went from $30 billion to $48 billion. We got the 5 percent coming every single year. It was quite an achievement: a 60 percent increase in that budget. Things were happening--good news, good developments when it came to cures and treatments. I was so proud of that effort and glad that it was bipartisan from the start.
So what did the Trump budget suggest we do with medical research? Cut it back from $48 billion to $30 billion, where we started 10 years ago. Do you know what happens when you cut back on research that basic? You know what happens, and I do too. When that terrible diagnosis happens at the doctor's office, it breaks your heart. And you finally stop crying, and you say to the doctor: Is there anything you can do? Is there a surgery, a medicine, anything you can do for someone I love very much?
And they say: Well, there is a clinical trial. There is medical research underway. It is a longshot, but you have a chance.
It is hope. Medical research is hope, and it is one of the areas where I think Donald Trump's cuts are the most heartless cuts of all. Democrats care about this. I do. I am willing to fight over it.
I am not willing to say: We will just go on with business as usual. Let's accept this. Let's cut back a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. Let's take 15 million Americans and take away their health insurance. Let's cut back $18 billion of medical research each year. And we will say it is just a clean continuing resolution bill.
That is what we are fighting over. Is it important? For me, it is one of the most important things we can do in terms of helping families across America.
And let me tell you something that is going on, and you should know about it. You will soon, if you are covered by it. Health insurance has tax treatment
That is the reality of this debate. It is not about who gets bragging rights and gets to beat on their chest--Democrat or Republican. In my mind, it is a question of whether families across this country can count on us for the basics, and making sure that healthcare is there for America is one of the basics, as far as I am concerned.
Mr. President, there is another issue I want to raise that relates to the administration, and you have to go back in history to appreciate it.
Richard Nixon--students of history, of course, know that name--was former Vice President of the United States, former Senator. He was a Senator and a Congressman, Vice President under President Eisenhower, and then President of the United States.
He went through a period we know as Watergate. It was controversial. Some people broke into the Democratic national headquarters. They were caught. They were prosecuted. When it was all over, we had the Watergate investigation, and, ultimately, President Nixon resigned. But before he resigned, he instructed his staff to give him background information on his enemies list, the people that he considered to be his political enemies. And the word was out that they were going to be treated harshly by his administration, whether it was the Department of Justice or the Internal Revenue Service.
Well, we went through that chapter. He resigned. And then Congress came together--Democrats and Republicans--and said: We can never let this happen again. We can't let a President put his finger on somebody and say: That is a political enemy. Go prosecute them. Try to find them guilty of a crime. Make sure they pay a fine. Give them bad publicity.
We agreed, on a bipartisan basis, for standards--between the White House, the Department of Justice, and Congress--when it came to these political decisions that could ultimately result in prosecution.
Well, under President Trump, we are back into the Nixon conversation about the ``enemies list,'' except President Trump's enemies list is longer than anything Richard Nixon ever dreamed of, and that is what we are looking at now.
On September 20, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, announced his resignation. The acting U.S. attorney, appointed by Trump, resigned. Mr. Siebert resisted President Trump's demands to bring charges without sufficient evidence against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.
Mr. Siebert, a Republican appointed by Donald Trump just a few weeks ago, stayed true to his oath to the Constitution and his commitment to following the facts and the law, and for that, he was forced to resign his office. In his place, President Trump installed his personal attorney--an attorney with no experience as a prosecutor; never did it before--to indict James Comey in a politically motivated case considered by career prosecutors in that office too weak to bring charges.
This indictment represents the latest step in President Trump's long crusade to weaponize the Federal Government against his perceived political enemies--a return to the days of Richard Nixon.
We remember when the President was initially impeached in the first of his historic two impeachments after he attempted to pressure a foreign ally to dig up dirt against Joe Biden and his family. We remember when President Trump turned a mob of insurrections loose on our Capitol, where they violently attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, leading to his second impeachment.
I will never forget that day as long as I live--January 6. It has been my honor to serve in this Chamber 29 years. I have seen a lot. I am honored to represent a great State like Illinois. But I will never forget that moment when we were sitting here counting the electoral college votes as to what the American people had decided of the next President. Vice President Pence was presiding. We were seated in our chairs. I noticed something unusual: Those two doors opened, and four or five people walked in, up to the Vice President, and literally yanked him out of his chair and took him out the door. We knew there was a political demonstration outside, but all of a sudden, it turned bad and scary and dangerous.
Capitol Police came in and announced to us seated in this Chamber: Stay at your desks. We are going to make this a safe Chamber here in the Capitol. Don't worry about those people demonstrating outside. They are not going to get close to the Chamber. Just stay where you are.
We looked at one another and thought, what is next? Well, what was next was, 10 minutes later, the same policeman came in and said: Leave immediately. Don't take anything with you; just get out of the Chamber. It is too dangerous for you to stay here.
We all--Democrats and Republicans--filed out those doors.
You know what happened next: The insurrections took over this building. It was one of the most embarrassing moments in the history of the U.S. Capitol Building.
Imagine, if you will, for a moment if you heard the news that the House of Commons in Parliament had its door broken down and people raided the chamber. You would say to yourself: What is going on in England, for goodness' sake? The House of Commons taken over by people in the street?
That is exactly what happened here, and it happened on January 6.
So this President, embarrassed by that moment, maybe--who knows if he is ever embarrassed--decided he would go after the people who prosecuted the insurrections, the people who were prosecuted for crimes like beating up policemen.
You all came here today, and we welcome you to this Chamber. The reason you are safe in this building today is a lot of women and men in uniform who are guarding you and me and all of our staff so we can do the people's business.
Those people were under attack by the January 6 insurrections. These were not curious tourists who came here. They ended up beating on these police, and 140 of them were seriously injured.
If you believe it, in his second administration, the President has gone further than Richard Nixon and what he has done before. His political appointees have fired FBI agents and Federal prosecutors who were called on to prosecute the insurrections. He has installed loyalists whose chief qualification is their loyalty to him, not their loyalty to the law or the Constitution.
We recently learned that a top Federal prosecutor in Sacramento was fired after she advised the Border Patrol to comply with a court order. Yes, the Trump administration fired a career prosecutor for following a court order.
Never in the history of our country has a President so brazenly demanded the baseless prosecution of his rivals, and he doesn't even try to conceal it or hide it. He glories in this constitutional outrage.
In a social media post, President Trump issued a command to Attorney General Bondi:
He is referring to the prosecution of James Comey.
Imagine that. A sitting President commanding his Attorney General to prosecute State and Federal officials who simply tried to uphold the rule of law. That is exactly what this President is doing. What Richard Nixon was stopped from doing, he is doing.
Since Watergate, Republican and Democratic Presidents alike respected the independence of the Justice Department, recognizing that shielding it from the pull of politics is essential to safeguarding the rule of law. Under President Trump, those constitutional guardrails have been removed--destroyed.
I want to be clear. What you are seeing from the Trump White House is not normal. This isn't some inside-the-beltway drama. If the President can turn the Department of Justice and the FBI into his own personal police force to target political enemies, he can just as easily turn it against ordinary Americans, and the dam is already starting to break.
The President sent Active-Duty forces into Los Angeles earlier this year to put down protests of his administration's cruel immigration raids. He threatened to make war on the city of Chicago, which I am honored to represent, by sending forces into that city, as well as Memphis, TN, and has now ordered the military to Portland, with authorization to use ``full force''--``full force''--in Portland, OR.
The Governor of Oregon and the mayor of Portland said that what the President said about being at war and ``unlivable'' is just plain wrong, and yet he does it.
It is a slippery slope into authoritarianism. Once DOJ and our military have been politicized, there are few guardrails left.
So while today it is Letitia James and James Comey who are the targets, tomorrow it could be our fellow citizens who dare to even criticize the policies of the Trump regime. That is the risk we face and the danger that lies ahead in this perilous moment. That is why I have opened an investigation calling for answers from Attorney General Bondi, including making available several Trump-installed loyalists for questioning. The American people deserve to know if the chief law enforcement Agency of the United States is following the Constitution or pursuing political revenge.
Let me end with this. During the Watergate scandal, President Nixon attempted to bend the Department of Justice to his will to go after his enemies and conceal his administration's involvement in this unlawful conduct.
When President Nixon did this, Democrats and Republicans on a bipartisan basis in Congress sounded the alarm together and defended the rule of law. On a bipartisan basis, we responded to Nixon. Those legislatures recognized the danger posed by a President attempting to wield power to benefit him personally. They knew it was unconstitutional, and they stood firm on a bipartisan basis in Congress.
Where is that same courage today? It is time for the Republicans to join Democrats and step up and say enough is enough. This is not about political parties; it is about protecting our democracy from a would-be dictator intent on setting it all ablaze to achieve his personal aims.
This is a code-red alarm for the rule of law, and unless we come together to stop the President's abuses, I fear this administration will continue to corrode our American democracy.
My question is this: Is there one Republican Senator in this Chamber who gives a damn?
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
Madam President, I want to begin my remarks this afternoon by reflecting on the tragic shooting at the Dallas ICE Facility that happened this last week. One detainee was killed and two others were injured by a 29-year-old shooter who was later found dead on the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
This is not the first attack of its kind against the immigration enforcement officials in Texas. In fact, this is the fourth in as many months--four attacks against law enforcement officials in the last 4 months.
On July 4 in Alvarado, TX, assailants opened fire outside an ICE detention facility, wounding an Alvarado Police Department officer in the neck. Ten people were subsequently arrested and charged with attempted murder while six other subjects have been charged with related offenses.
Three days later, July 7, a man shot at a Border Patrol employee in McAllen as he tried to park his car. He then fired at the Border Patrol annex, attempting to break in, before finally being killed in a firefight with Border Patrol agents.
In addition to these attacks on law enforcement, we know our country is still reeling from the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, whose life was taken from him simply for expressing his views and engaging in political dialogue on college campuses.
We are beginning to see in our country a level of political violence that is not and should not ever be considered normal.
But this is a warning signal about the direction we are heading in as a nation, and it is one we cannot afford to ignore. Many of us are asking ourselves, how did we get here? Well, the answer, it seems--or at least part of the answer--is simple and straightforward. It begins with the demonization of free speech and the vilification of those who are doing nothing more and nothing less than their duty, which is to enforce the laws on the books. Frequently, these are laws passed by Congress on a bipartisan basis and signed into law by the President. These law enforcement officials are simply enforcing the laws that we have written. The radical base of the Democratic Party seems to be at war with the men and women who actually enforce our laws, and with the same breath, they seem to, from time to time, celebrate mob violence. We all remember the so-called peaceful protests of 2020 that resulted in massive economic losses and harms to businesses, not to mention that many law enforcement officers were injured or even died as a result of mob violence.
Embarrassingly, it was a Texas Member of the House of Representatives, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who recently said on national television:
Not to be outdone, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described ICE as a ``rogue agency that should not exist.''
Then there is former Member of Congress Colin Allred, who called ICE ``un-American'' and ``harmful to our public safety.''
These attacks against the men and women who enforce our laws are simply unconscionable, and they have undeniably contributed to getting us in the dangerous place we find ourselves in today.
If these individuals and other Democrats truly cared about public safety, they would stand with Republicans. We would stand united as Americans in supporting our men and women in blue and green, and they would denounce the unprecedented rise in attacks against these law enforcement officers immediately. Instead, Democrats seem to endorse a complete inversion of how a just and ordered society functions.
Unfortunately, this is going to require some of our Democratic colleagues to swim against the tide of opinion among their radical base and show some leadership. But they have to decide as a party to move away from the dangerous and radical demands of their leftwing base.
Unfortunately, the Democratic leader in this Chamber, the Senator from New York, is showing anything but that kind of leadership right now. He has demonstrated a complete unwillingness to tone down the rhetoric of his party or to make actually even good-faith gestures toward good governance. In fact, this very week, he has demonstrated just how far he is willing to go to undermine basic governance in order to appease his radical base. He would rather shut down the government than work across the aisle for the benefit of the American people.
Senate Democrats have so far refused to even vote on a simple stopgap measure that will give us a little more time--about 9 weeks--to negotiate full-year government funding. If they do not relent in this partisan posturing, the result will be forever known as the Schumer shutdown.
You don't have to take it from me on what a government shutdown would mean for the American people; all we have to do is to read back to them the very words Senate Democrats have said in the past.
In September of last year, when the shoe was on the other foot, Senator Schumer said:
He also said:
Is this even the same individual that is taking the position that is heading us toward a shutdown in the coming days?
Last September, he went so far as to even say:
This is what he said just last year about a government shutdown. Where is that man today? Today, I will tell you, he is engaging in reckless, partisan posturing while Republicans are proposing a responsible alternative.
Again, this is not a vote on a permanent policy but, rather, a stopgap measure to get us to a place where we need to be when it comes to the appropriations process.
But he is willing to impose the very costs that he warned about on the American people and our seniors in order to score political points with his progressive, radical base. The hypocrisy is obvious, and it is staggering.
It is a time for reckoning for our friends in the Democratic Party. They seem to not really know what they stand for these days except opposition to each and every thing that the majority party or the President wants, even when it is in their self-interest to do so. They need to look at themselves in the mirror and decide what and who they stand for. Are they going to be the party of violence and lawlessness and a degradation in public safety? Are they going to continue to what has been called frighteningly an assassination culture? Will they continue down this mad path of taking the lives of those they disagree with and siding with the criminals over law enforcement personnel that are simply enforcing laws they themselves have helped write? Will they continue on prioritizing their ideology ahead of responsible governance?
I often wonder how our friends on the other side of the aisle would react if they had to live--if they had to live--in crime-ridden neighborhoods overtaken by gangs and drug dealers and they had to wait 20 or 30 minutes before any police officer responded to their calls for help after an assault or a robbery. How would they feel? Well, I am quite sure, I am confident that they would change their tune. Just like current residents in blue cities who had to suffer under the weight of failed Democratic soft-on-crime policing policies, they would gladly welcome additional police protection and efforts to clean up and stabilize their neighborhoods.
Sadly, most Democrats--at least so far here in Washington, DC--have appeared to be completely tone-deaf and rarely hear the true voices of the people whose lives they assume they represent, people living in these inner cities.
Well, regardless of what Democrats decide to stand for, Republicans will continue to be the party that respects free and open discussion of ideas. We will continue to support our law enforcement officers, men and women who risk their lives day in and day out so that Texans and all Americans can sleep soundly in their beds. We will continue to be the party that opposes reckless partisan tactics that put ideology ahead of the needs of the American people.
Republicans have made it clear under President Trump that we will enforce the rule of law. That is nonnegotiable. So it is no surprise that the American people overwhelmingly voted for Republican leadership last November.
If Democrats continue to head down this path of violence and division, they should not be surprised if they continue to experience the same outcome at the ballot box in the upcoming midterms as they did last November in the general election.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Madam President, this spring, just a few days before Congress enacted the last continuing resolution, which is the spending plan--this resolution that would extend the Biden-era spending levels-- President Trump said in a speech that he wanted to do something that hadn't been done in over 20 years: balance the budget. I fully commend him for that, and I am very supportive of trying to get there.
The difficulty is that the spending levels that we voted on in March and the spending levels we will vote on again this week don't balance the budget and don't come anywhere close. These are the spending levels that Biden put in place in December before he left office.
Most Republicans were critical and condemnatory. Many conservative Republicans, like myself, voted against these spending levels because they were such that they would lead to a $2 trillion deficit. Well, that is still true. This year, the deficit will be right around $2 trillion, and it is because we have continued the Biden spending levels.
To balance the budget, Congress needs a much stronger response than the legislation being presented. Critics of excessive Federal spending have rightly argued that Congress should return to prepandemic levels of spending. When the pandemic came in, spending went through the roof. The economy was shut down. They wrote free checks to all Americans. The problem is that all that was borrowed. There was no money. There was no rainy day fund.
Now, there is a way to tackle the budget and to try to balance the budget over time. I have a Penny Plan budget that I have been introducing for several years. We have not gotten any Democrat support, but we have gotten over half of the Republicans to support it. My Penny Plan would balance over about a 5-year period and would return spending almost immediately to what would be a prepandemic level.
Six months ago, though, when the current continuing resolution was passed, Republicans were told that we were just clearing the decks, that this was going to be temporary, and that we would then be bold and present budgets that would cut spending. Once President Trump was in office, with a Republican majority in the Senate and the House, we would finally address spending levels. And wouldn't you know it-- getting serious about a balanced budget is not on the agenda this week. There really isn't any serious change. What we are talking about is a continuing resolution that continues the Biden spending levels. These spending levels this year have led to almost $2 trillion in deficit and are projected next year to lead to $2.1 trillion in deficit.
In addition, we will also be voting on something called an automatic continuing resolution proposal. This is the idea that, rather than having the government shut down, it would just continue spending the same amount of money. In theory, I like the concept; I just don't really like continuing the Biden-era spending levels because they never balance--not over 5 years; not over 10 years; really, never. The lines never cross. So, sure, you would keep the government open, but you would keep the government open and spend the same amount we do currently, which is out of control and not defensible. So keeping the government open while continuing $2 trillion deficits hardly seems desirable.
Rather than the relentless fury to tackle the debt, which is what we were promised with a Republican majority, the powers that be have once again waved the white flag of surrender by failing to present the American people with legislation that would make the cuts necessary to balance the budget.
Under the proposed continuing resolution or the automatic continuing resolution we will vote on tonight, the budget never balances. Even if you take it out as far as the eye can see, revenue will never meet expenditures. So it is just not something I can support, and I don't think it is a conservative proposal. Spending has gotten so out of control that this freeze, even over a decade, doesn't put a dent in the deficit.
Presidents of both parties pay lipservice to the idea that the national debt must be addressed. Yet it gets worse under both parties. People ask me: Whose fault is it--Republicans or Democrats? And I just say: Yes, it is both parties. The right wants unlimited spending for the military, and the left wants unlimited spending for welfare. So you have guns and butter. You scratch my back, and I will scratch yours, and it all goes up.
Now, the reverse compromise could happen. You could actually cut a little bit from the military side and a little bit from the welfare side, and really everybody would get a little bit of a haircut across the board. You could balance your budget that way. But you can't exclude or exempt huge swaths of
I am proud of the President for what he has tried to do, though. Unlike past Presidents, Donald Trump has created the Department of Government Efficiency to identify and eliminate waste. DOGE has found billions of dollars of waste. Americans were rightfully appalled when they were told that your government has been spending $2 million on sex changes in Guatemala. I mean, it sounds like a bad punch line that, you know, you might hear from late night comics--$2 million on sex changes in Guatemala. Your government was spending that money, and the DOGE people came in and said: We shouldn't do it.
I have been talking about these things for years, but finally we have an administration that is interested in it.
There is $25,000 for an LGBT opera in Colombia and nearly $1 million to study the microaggressions among obese Latinx, whatever that means.
But it is just crazy wasted money. I mean, it would be one thing if it was from even a surplus of crazy wasted money, but we are doing this, and we have to borrow the money from China to send to all these crazy projects around the world. This doesn't even count the $200 billion we have sent to Ukraine. That is all borrowed as well.
This summer, President Trump sent Congress a special message identifying $9.4 billion in rescissions, and Congress, for the first time in a long time, did the right thing: We voted for and passed this rescissions package to cut $9 billion.
I supported, as I always do, cutting this foreign aid. With a deficit of $2 trillion a year, though, $9 billion is a drop in the bucket. We have to do more. Congress has to do more.
As much as I appreciate this, the power of the purse needs to be exerted more by Congress. We have let so many of these decisionmaking powers devolve to the President. The Founders, I think, would be appalled with Congress. They would be appalled with what Congress has become. Congress exerts no powers. It gives away its powers and does not seek a restoration of its powers.
Right now, we are living under emergency rule, where the President has declared emergencies on 160 countries and has declared that he has the right to declare whatever he wants through import taxes. Well, our Founding Fathers would be appalled. The Constitution is very clear: Taxes originate in Congress, and even more specifically, taxes originate in the House of Representatives.
Unfortunately, Congress has been all too happy to wither in the shadow of the Presidency that grows larger with each successive administration. Whether it be Republican or Democrat, the Presidency grows larger and stronger; to wit, the continuing resolution that we are considering--the spending plan that we are considering--maintains the Biden spending levels.
If you will remember, there was an election. Do you remember the Republicans all said: Bidenomics and Bidenflation and Biden spending-- we are against all that.
That was kind of what the election was decided on, and now you have a Republican in the White House, Republicans in the Senate, and Republicans in the House, and we are living under the Biden spending levels that they complained about.
The great irony is, the Democrats have now switched. The Democrats supported the Biden spending levels under President Biden. Now there is a President Trump and the spending levels are exactly the same, and all the Democrats are voting no. It makes no sense at all.
It is really ironic that every Democrat Senator supported the spending levels just 9 months ago that we are voting on now. So when they say ``continuing resolution,'' we are continuing the same spending levels that we started with in December of last year, and every Democrat voted for them.
Likewise, in December of last year, conservative Republicans voted against the Biden spending levels, and now they are poised to vote for the Biden spending levels. Both parties have completely flip-flopped to the opposite side of the same issue that hasn't changed. Congress has truly entered the upside-down world.
To add insult to irony, the CR before us adds the foreign aid dollars we canceled 2 months ago back into the baseline spending. So we, finally, for the first time and as long as I can remember, had a vote to get rid of this crazy foreign aid, this foreign welfare. We did the right thing. We got rid of $9 billion. There is still another 40-some- odd billion dollars in the budget. We got rid of $9 billion. By voting on this continuing resolution today, they are sticking the foreign aid back in. The foreign aid will be back part of the baseline again. We have to go through the whole thing again. It is almost as if DOGE never existed, as if DOGE never found all this stuff, criticized it, shamed Congress into doing the right thing, and we cut the foreign aid. It is going back in. So we are going to do a CR that doesn't lessen the foreign aid spending. It is going to have the same level of foreign aid spending we had last year.
I am not going to fall for this trick, and conservatives shouldn't either. As Jefferson tells us, our job is to be eternally vigilant. What the country needs is a bipartisan effort in Congress to reclaim the power of the purse and to do what is necessary to eliminate duplicative spending, wasteful spending, and spend only what we can afford.
We have some programs here that were begun 40 years ago, authorized. People said: We are going to solve the problem of homelessness, 40 years ago. The programs have been reauthorized, and we just continue living on and on. Then, every year or so, someone goes: Wow, we have a homeless problem. Why don't we get another government program to build homes?
They did this in California recently. They spent $27 billion over a several-year period. Do you know what the average unit cost for the affordable housing was? A million dollars a unit. That is the history of government, the incompetence of government; that they are going to build houses for poor people, and it turned out costing them a million dollars a unit to build houses for poor people.
Just 2 weeks ago, a majority of the Republican caucus actually did vote for my Six Penny Plan. The Penny Plan, as I have said, is to cut spending across the board. It is how we would actually finally balance the budget. It is this compromise that everything needs a little bit of a haircut. Unfortunately, we have gotten no Democrat support for it. We got a little over half the caucus, but probably a little over a third-- 30, 40 percent of the caucus--is still believing that we should just keep spending levels as they are or continue to increase spending. So we are not quite there yet. There is not quite enough fear of where we are.
But $37 trillion in debt is not something to be sneezed at. We are adding in $2 trillion a year. The interest alone is about $1 trillion. Some people have made the argument that a country can no longer remain strong when its interest payments on its debt exceed its actual spending to defend itself, the military spending. So I think we are really at a tipping point.
Everybody comes to us for money. Everybody has got their hand out. Everybody wants more out of us. From Israel to Israel's neighbors, everybody has got their hand out. Everybody wants more money from us. And I think it makes no sense for us to be borrowing it from China to give it to other countries, no matter how good the request is.
The plans that have been presented before us--we had two plans presented: a Republican plan and a Democrat plan. Which one adds debt? Yes, both of them. The Republican plan will add $2 trillion in debt next year if we continue spending at the same level. The Democrat plan said we want another trillion on top of that, so it would be a $3 trillion deficit next year. So neither party is serious about this.
But there is an alternative, when we get enough Republicans, and that is the Penny Plan that I have been offering for several years. It balances it by gradually reducing spending just a little bit each year.
But by supporting yet another continuing resolution at the current spending levels, Republicans are essentially signing off on the fiscal policies of the Biden administration--policies Republicans once rightly opposed.
Just a short time ago, virtually every Republican was saying the Biden
This measure is not a reversal of the status quo; it is the status quo. It does nothing to address our debt. It does nothing to divert our trajectory that is bankrupting this Nation. This is not some theoretical debate; this is math. This is what will happen. This is what happened last year and is going to happen again--$2 trillion in additional debt.
We bring in about $4.7 trillion. We spend $6.7 trillion. We are spending $2 trillion more than comes in. This isn't like an emergency. This isn't even the excuse of the pandemic. This is routine business, routine status quo, $2 trillion in deficit every year.
If we stay on this path, we keep spending like we did during the pandemic or under the Biden administration, we are guaranteeing a future of higher inflation and crippling debt for our children and grandchildren.
We are running out of ways to fix this. We are running out of time.
The CBO projects that within the next 10 years, mandatory spending-- this is all the welfare programs--and interest alone will exceed revenue. We are getting pretty close to that now.
Think about that. We vote on a budget that is not mandatory spending. Military spending is considered to be discretionary, and then there is a bunch of discretionary welfare. Military is a little bit more than the welfare. That is the budget we vote on. Then you have mandatory spending, which is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and then interest on the debt. That, essentially, is equal to what comes in. The taxes that are coming in equal the mandatory spending. So when we actually do produce a budget, which isn't very often, the stuff we are spending is almost entirely borrowed.
If you look at the discretionary spending budget, it is about $1.8, $1.9 trillion. That is the debt. That is what the debt is. The debt is, essentially, equivalent to the discretionary spending. The mandatory programs, the welfare programs, have gotten so big, and they grow with such abundance each year. We have added in young, healthy, able-bodied people to these programs that really shouldn't be on welfare. You have added these people in, and it is consuming all of your taxes. So, really, everything else is being borrowed.
Entitlement programs and interest will consume every single dollar within a year or two that comes in, in tax revenue.
Imagine if you were running your household that way: no money left for food, clothing, shelter, unless you take out a loan every single year forever. That is what we are doing. You really can't live that way. You can borrow if you want to borrow to buy a house, but the bank holds the house. But you don't borrow money to pay rent for your apartment. You don't borrow money to pay for your groceries. You have to actually earn that money and have enough for your daily living expenses. We are to the point where we are borrowing for the daily living expenses of government.
My amendment that I have offered to this would take the automatic renewal that prevents us from shutting down--take the automatic renewal and put in the Penny Plan numbers so what you would actually have is not running the government at the same levels, at the Biden levels; you would actually reduce spending by 6 percent.
I am fine to make it automatic. I am fine to let it kick in and go on so we don't shut the government down, and we avoid the chaos and the discomfort of having the government shut down. But we shouldn't keep spending the same amount of money. That would be like abdicating our duty just to spend the same amount.
But if we were to use my Penny Plan budget, we would be returning to prepandemic spending levels, a significant cut that would put us on the path to balancing our budget within 5 years.
The government, though, has lost sight--lost sight--of its priorities. The American people are the ones paying the price. The big spenders don't tell you the truth. They don't tell you that it is all borrowed. They don't tell you that you are being ripped off by inflation. They don't tell you that well, gosh, we are going to give you all this stuff, but it has a cost.
Really, nothing really is free in life. There is really not any possibility of getting something for nothing. What you get from government through borrowed money you pay for through inflated prices.
The inflation of the Biden years didn't go away. Over the last 3 or 4 years in the grocery store, a lot of the meat and the different items in the grocery store went up 20 percent. When they say inflation is slowing down, that means we are just not adding more to it. But if you don't make 20 percent more than you made 4 years ago, you are being ripped off. You are being ripped off by inflation.
It wasn't that long ago that my colleagues, at least on this side of the aisle, stood united in opposition to this fiscal recklessness. It wasn't that long ago that we drew a line in the sand on debt and the debt ceiling; that we demanded spending caps; that we said we wouldn't mortgage our children's future to fund today's political convenience. Now, some seem content to roll over and lock in the very policies that we ran against.
I won't do that, and I won't urge my colleagues to do that either. We can't claim to be fiscal conservatives while voting for more and more debt. We can't claim to be this great opposition to the Biden spending levels and then vote the Biden spending levels in. We can't claim to not like deficit spending and then vote for spending that will inevitably lead to another $2 trillion in debt next year.
This country can't afford to write another blank check. We can't afford to lock in the fiscal mistakes of the past. We need real reform. We need it now. We need to return to the principles of limited, constitutional government. If we obeyed the Constitution--most of the nonsense, most of the spending that goes on up here really isn't authorized under the Constitution. If we return to the Constitution, the principles of limited government, responsible budgeting, and economic freedom, we would have a balanced budget again. We need to start today.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to waive the mandatory quorum calls with respect to the Waltz nomination and Calendar No. 161, S. 2806.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
Madam President, I expect the distinguished minority leader, my friend from New York, will speak possibly after the first vote and report that we are still at an impasse on funding the government, which, of course, expires at midnight tomorrow night.
At that point, I want to implore my colleagues on this side of the aisle, and particularly the Democratic leader, to agree that while we are at an impasse, there is still very, very important business to attend to, and that is the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, which, as the President knows, has been reported from the Senate Armed Services Committee, some months ago, by an overwhelming majority vote, with only one dissenting vote. I think it was a vote of 24 to 1. That bill was reported to the floor.
Our side of the cloakroom has run several hotlines, and we have been ready to go now for several days. Our disappointment has been that while the distinguished ranking member of the Armed Services Committee has been willing to proceed and a number of our friends on both sides of the dais, Republicans and Democrats, on the Armed Services Committee have been willing to proceed, we don't have engagement yet from the minority leadership.
So I simply want to express aloud what I hope I can engage the Senator from New York about when he does speak. While we are at an impasse and the Senate is still in session, it seems to me a reasonable thing to do to bring this bipartisan, noncontroversial, but highly significant bill to the floor.
We have agreed to a managers' package on our side. We actually have 985 Member-driven items already in the National Defense Authorization Act. We have agreed to a number of amendments and a second managers' package.
There is very little difference on what will be brought to the Senate for votes, and it just seems to me that we don't need to sit around idly while negotiations perhaps are going on with the White House, with the House, and the Senate. We need to proceed to this very essential legislation--the national defense bill.
If we could get that done this week, I think it would show to our constituents back home in both parties--Independent, Republican, and Democrat--that we are serious about the business of protecting the United States, enacting this very important legislation and the changes we need so that we are not doing last decade's type of national defense but doing our job under the Constitution to make sure the United States is strong.
So I would make that request to my Democratic friends and to my Republican friends, most of whom, on our side, are ready to proceed and have been ready to proceed on the National Defense Authorization Act.
I yield the floor.
Government Funding (Executive Session)
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. President, Donald Trump is powerful, but he is not all-powerful. It is true that he is trying to consolidate power in illegal and dangerous ways, but it is also true that he is often failing to do that because of public opinion, because of markets, because of institutions, and because of the law itself.
I want to give a couple of recent examples. Two weeks ago, shortly after Trump and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr threatened to punish ABC if it didn't suspend Jimmy Kimmel's show, the network announced that it was taking the show off the air indefinitely. So at first, the public coercion seemed to work. Brendan Carr had said, point blank:
And the network caved. But a swift and searing backlash quickly followed. Consumers revolted. People began canceling their subscriptions.
Disney's market cap fell by close to $6.5 billion in a matter of days. Artists, advertisers, and employees spoke out. Even Republicans in the Senate denounced the move.
My Senate colleague Ted Cruz called it ``dangerous as hell":
Criticizing your own party's administration is hard. I understand that. But this is not about whether you are left or right or whether you thought Jimmy Kimmel's comment was insensitive or not. It is about the basic question of ``Are we allowed to speak freely in the country without fear that the government is going to come after us?'' because, if not, that is not the America that any of us recognize.
Here is another example. Last week, Trump installed a loyalist with no experience as prosecutor as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and within days, the office indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges without much evidence at all.
And the case is so absurd that they couldn't even get a single career prosecutor to take it on. So, instead, the newly installed interim U.S. attorney had to sign and present the indictment herself in a highly unusual move. One of the charges was rejected by the grand jury almost immediately.
Now, why does that matter? It is, without a doubt, a dark day for the country when the President of the United States uses the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents. But legal experts widely expect this case to fail before it even gets to trial. And that, too, will be a reminder that while this President is powerful, he is not all-powerful. This isn't a free-for-all. He doesn't get to just do whatever he wants.
That brings me to this debate about government funding. Democrats are out of power, but we are not powerless, and our price is not that high. We have been asking Republicans, for over a month, to sit down and negotiate. I have been here 13\1/2\ years. We have never passed an appropriations bill without negotiation.
But Trump literally told his party: ``Don't even bother dealing with them.'' And so it took them until today, on the eve of a shutdown, for a meeting.
And the House is out of town. The House adjourned until after the funding deadline expires. They were going to come back on October 1, which is already 24 hours too late. Now they are thinking October 7.
If you are serious about a deal, if you are serious about keeping the government open, why are you not in the U.S. Capitol?
Russ Vought, in July, the OMB Director, said: You know, the appropriations process should be less bipartisan.
The person in charge of the Federal Government in the executive branch is pretty explicit. He says: The appropriations process should not involve Democrats at all.
The only way to keep the government open is for both parties to negotiate a bipartisan agreement. If the Republicans want to listen to Donald Trump and say, ``Don't even bother dealing with the Democrats,'' then there is a very old adage and an iron law in politics, which is: If you don't ask for the vote, you do not get the vote.
We are ready to work together to keep this government open, and I want everybody to understand what we are fighting for--what we are fighting for. Tens of millions of Americans are getting letters in the mail, and they don't know they are on the Affordable Care Act exchange. What the hell is that anyway? They just sign up for healthcare on a website, right? You don't know if you are on Obamacare or some hybrid thing or employer or this or that. You just get a letter from your insurer, and they say: If you want to reenroll in your healthcare plan, here is how much it will be. It is usually like a small increase, year over year, to cover inflation.
So now they are going to get a letter that literally says: Your subsidies are gone, and your new price is x. The average increase is going to be hundreds of dollars per person per month. Add to that that we are hearing in some States, and maybe as a result of some job owning with the administration, they are waiting to send those letters. They are waiting to send those letters. Why? Because they are hoping we are going to resolve this ACA tax credit thing, and they don't want to eat, politically speaking, the fact that a bunch of people, tens of millions of people--Democrats, Republicans, Independents, nonvoters, but zero noncitizens--zero noncitizens--you are not eligible to be on the exchange if you are a noncitizen--are going to get a letter saying: You know it is going to be $3,000 or $4,000 more per year.
Like, go talk to a regular person. Some of us know regular people who are on that exchange and know: I just can't do it--$300 dollars more per month. And, by the way, if you get that letter in December and your first payment is due on January 1, you are extra screwed.
So I understand that the White House understands how big of a political liability this is because people are really going to get hurt. And now it is a question of sort of people wanting to not behave as though they are giving in.
But let's be adults here. There is a crisis that is about to happen to tens of millions of Americans, and we have an opportunity to fix it, and there is bipartisan desire to fix it. And Leader Thune and Speaker Johnson's view is: Nah, we will deal with that later. And Donald Trump was saying: Why don't we deal with that next year?
By next year, all of the rates are locked in, and people will be paying $300 or $400 or $500 more per person per month.
We can fix this, and we should.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. President, I come to the floor today because we have a choice here, and the Democratic leaders in both the Senate and the House just went to the White House. They had a long meeting. I am glad that meeting happened. I hope something will come out of it.
But the President has repeatedly said: Well, we don't need Democratic votes. Well, we can do this on our own.
The problem is the more he says that, the more the American people are saying: What about me?
``What about me?'' says the farmer whose soybean market is dried up, whom I met with last week. ``What about me?'' says the mom coming out of the grocery store and looking at her bill or the student thinking ``I can't afford this electricity bill'' or everyone that is starting to look at these healthcare numbers, looking at the insurance premiums, looking at the fact that this administration has not stood up for them on healthcare?
So if they would open their eyes right now and see what is going on out
The tariffs may be decided in the courts or the Congress can decide enough is enough, but this healthcare crisis--that is on this body to do something right now. The President has sadly made his position clear. He would rather shut down the government than work with congressional Democrats to address this skyrocketing healthcare cost crisis.
So our colleagues, many of whom I work with every day, they can decide: Are they going to rubberstamp what he does or are they going try to work with us?
So one of the things that one of the farmers said to me last week, at one of my meetings, is this: Between my entire market drying up--in Minnesota, 60 percent of our soybeans are exported to other countries; of course, China hasn't purchased a bushel since this President came in--and the cost of fertilizer going up because of the tariffs on potash out of Canada--and even then, though they were reduced, it is still a major driver--between the issues with visas and not having enough workers--he described it, as he looked at the healthcare policy and what is happening there, since about 28 percent of our farmers are on the Affordable Care Act because they are individual businessowners-- he said it is the perfect storm of ugly.
I think that is a good way to describe it. So what do you do when there is a storm--a perfect storm of ugly--coming at you? Do you go out there with an umbrella and say, well, maybe we can look at this in a month or two?
You don't have that luxury. The American people don't have that luxury. This is not a December thing. This is not a January thing. This is a now thing.
So I hope our colleagues will see it as the opportunity that it is, and that is to finally do something to help the people that are facing this.
NBC recently reported on one family that currently pays $278 a month for health insurance, thanks to the healthcare tax credit. If Republicans in Congress and the President let this expire, this family's premiums could soar to $1,800 a month, an increase of $1,500 a month.
The estimate is that nationally it will be a 75-percent increase in premiums. In rural, it will be double. I was actually surprised at our rural hospitals--of course, they are concerned about the Medicaid cuts--that the $500 billion in Medicare cuts that is coming at them, because of the fact that the debt was increased so much in that bill with the tax cuts for the wealthy that it triggered an automatic $500 billion of Medicare costs.
All of that is worrisome, but maybe I just hadn't thought it through. The Affordable Care Act premium increases, without any tax credits, really concern them. Why? Because so many of their people that are going into their hospitals in rural areas are either on Medicaid or they are on what we call in Minnesota MNsure, their policy through the Affordable Care Act.
Those people won't be able to afford double--no way--because they are already in that perfect storm of ugly. So then they aren't going to have insurance, and they are going to show up in their emergency rooms, in these midsize towns, with no insurance. So they said this could make a major, major difference for them.
Our legislation would have kept the lights on. Our bill, it got more votes than the Republican bill. I would like to point that out. A whole bunch of people didn't even show up for the vote that we just had a week ago, and our proposal that did something about healthcare--to restore people's healthcare--actually got more votes than the Republican proposal.
So we want people to work with us and prevent millions of Americans from losing their healthcare. This is our opportunity to show why we came here to begin with, and that is to stand up for our constituents.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. President, for the past 6 or so months, I have been crisscrossing the State of Wisconsin, listening to families, small business owners, parents, caregivers, doctors, nurses, and neighbors about what good, affordable healthcare means to them. And the overwhelming consensus, as you might expect, was that having healthcare you can rely on and afford means everything.
I know this exact feeling. When I was just 9 years old, I had a very serious childhood illness, similar to spinal meningitis. That wasn't the exact diagnosis. But I was in the hospital for 3 months, and even though I was able to make a full recovery, my family was then not able to find any health insurance to cover me, not at any price, because I had been labeled as a child with a preexisting health condition.
You see, back then, insurance companies were under no obligation to cover people who had been sick or were sick. So people with preexisting health conditions, like diabetes or a cancer diagnosis, so often went uninsured. That kind of experience, being hospitalized for months and then not being able to get health insurance, it is not an experience that one forgets.
So when we have these debates about healthcare policy, I know that it is not just a high-minded conceptual idea. It is real. The consequences are real, and the people behind the stories are real.
And over the past few months, I have been able to hear those real stories. I heard stories from families who were sometimes unable to put into words what it would mean if their Medicaid were stripped away.
I heard from Evan in Madison, WI. Evan is on Medicaid. We call it Badger Care in the State of Wisconsin. Evan has undergone two brain surgeries and subsequent radiation over the past 10 years to treat brain tumors. Thankfully, he has Medicaid to help cover this care, but his ability to stay healthy means that he needs medication. He wrote to me and said that without Medicaid, ``I won't be able to afford my medication that literally gives me the ability to go out and be a part of my community.''
I also heard from Ashley from De Pere, WI. She told me how Medicaid was essential for her 15-year-old daughter with disabilities. Medicaid has allowed her to modify her home so her daughter can safely get around and also allowed the family to get a wheelchair-accessible van so her daughter can get to school and get to the doctor and just be a kid and experience the world.
These are the Americans who are now living in fear that their Medicaid is on track to be terminated because my Republican colleagues jammed through a partisan bill that cuts Medicaid to the bone and will kick more than 10 million Americans off their healthcare. As always, I would be remiss if I did not say that was all in service to giving huge tax breaks to big, profitable corporations and the ultrawealthy.
This is the damage that I am hearing about from the people I work for, and, sadly, the stories from folks who are worried their healthcare is on the line don't end there. Twenty-four million Americans get their healthcare from the Affordable Care Act, and they are waiting right now for that dreaded letter in the mail letting them know that their premium costs are about to skyrocket. For the 22 million who receive enhanced premium tax credits, their costs will go up on average by 75 percent. Four million of these Americans are going to get that letter and realize that they cannot afford healthcare at all anymore.
This, of course, is because my Republican colleagues refuse to pass our bill to extend the enhanced premium tax credits and make them permanent, which allow millions of Americans to get affordable healthcare through the ACA.
I heard from some of those families and small business owners last week. They are just dreading what they are about to find out and what the future holds for them.
Take Kim, who owns a bakery in the Fox Valley. Last week, she laid out how if Republicans refuse to extend these tax breaks, she is not only worried about how she will be able to afford her healthcare but also that increased costs on the exchange will mean that employees may quit working for her to go work for a big company that offers insurance. And, of course, she is worried that her customers will inevitably be left with less
I also heard from Keith in Marathon County, who runs his own insurance business. He knows this issue inside out, and Keith laid out some staggering figures for me of what he is staring down. If Republicans don't join me in extending these premium tax credits and making them permanent, Keith's premiums will go from less than $740 per month to more than $2,300 per month just to get insurance for his family. That is a staggering increase.
It is no exaggeration to say that the American people are staring down a healthcare crisis. We have a healthcare system in crisis. And I want to be clear that it is 100 percent manufactured by my Republican colleagues.
But do you know what? This is still avoidable. It is still avoidable. I am hearing my constituents sounding the alarm, so I am here to do the same. I got the memo that they don't want to have Medicaid gutted, they don't want to have their Affordable Care Act tax credits taken away, and they don't want their costs to skyrocket.
The people I work for have been crystal clear about what they expect and demand of Congress: Work together to lower costs and give them the opportunity for their hard work to let them save and to let them get ahead.
So that is my position. We need to lower the costs of healthcare, not take it away from families. I simply refuse to just go along to get along because the people I represent are truly struggling, and the solution is right in front of us.
That brings us to today. The path to keep the government open and stop healthcare costs from rising for millions is on the table. The whole idea of a shutdown is totally avoidable. If Republicans refuse to see what is right in front of them, then a shutdown is on them. And Wisconsinites will know exactly who to thank when they get that dreaded letter and their healthcare costs skyrocket or they see it simply stripped away.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, the House of Representatives is not coming back into session, reportedly, until next week. The government is shutting down tomorrow night, and the Republican House of Representatives isn't here, and they aren't coming back until the government has been shut down--reportedly for days. That tells you all you need to know about who is responsible for a potential shutdown of the government. Republicans care so little about funding the government that they aren't even showing up.
President Trump doesn't care either. He boycotted even meeting with Democrats until 24 hours before the shutdown was to begin. He was watching golf or posting on social media--basically anything except trying to negotiate, to do the job of government.
I wish Republicans were trying to keep the government open instead of trying to shut it down, but what I really want is for Republicans to open their eyes and see what is happening at an increasing pace to our democracy.
What I want and what I think is necessary at this moment is for any budget that we write to put the health of our democracy first. In fact, as I have watched the events of the past few weeks play out, with political enemies being systematically hunted by this administration, I think that we all have a moral obligation to only support a budget that at the very least puts the brakes on the President's lawlessness.
Right now, our democracy is in grave peril, and there is no better example of this than the events that played out last week over the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.
The President has made it clear that he wants to put his political enemies in jail as retribution for the charges brought against him. He does not care about whether there are grounds for these charges; he just wants charges. So he instructed Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney in Virginia, a Republican, to bring charges against James Comey, but Seibert refused for a simple reason: There was no evidence that James Comey had done anything illegal. So Trump fired Siebert, and he appointed his personal lawyer, who has never set foot in a courtroom, as the new U.S. attorney simply because he knew she would follow orders.
Every career prosecutor in the office recommended she refuse to bring the charges--again, because there were no charges to be brought--but she did it anyway, as instructed. Not a single other lawyer in the office would sign the indictment--virtually unprecedented in a case like this.
Trump cheered the indictment, and then he warned that there would be more charges brought against others that had vocally opposed his policies.
That is not all that happened in the last 2 weeks. Trump ordered the FCC to issue threats to TV stations that did not remove one of his primary late night critics, Jimmy Kimmel, from the airwaves. He announced new military deployments to additional cities. He began a process to harass and arrest leaders of prominent political groups that oppose his Presidency, threatening at least one funder of groups that oppose his policies, George Soros, with arrest simply for supporting opposition to Trump.
Much of this, though not all of it, has happened in the wake of the brutal, horrific murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. His assassination was abhorrent, and it was and still is a moment for all of us to consider what we can do to stamp out political violence and violence of all kinds. But his murder does not justify the dizzying campaign of political repression that has been carried out--often in his name--since. To exploit his murder to crush dissent or to censor speech is unacceptable.
This brings me back to the debate over the expiring budget. I join with my colleagues in wanting this new budget to at the very least postpone the healthcare insurance increases that are coming for millions of Americans and that are going to ruin people's lives in this country--75 percent increases for people, who are going to make this awful decision about whether they should continue to pay their premiums, whether they should put food on their table for their kids, or whether they should risk going without insurance.
I think that is a pretty reasonable ask. Just don't increase costs on families when it comes to healthcare at a time when the cost of everything else is going up because of President Trump's insane economic policies.
But let me ask you this as well: Why would we not also simply say that any budget we pass should stop the worst of the lawlessness? Stop the deployments to our cities. Stop the witch hunt of Comey and Soros and Senator Schiff. Stop using the FCC to censor speech. Stop unconstitutionally ignoring the budget and spending only money that the President wants to spend.
To me, this is simple: We should not willingly pay the bills for the most serious assault on political freedom since the Civil War--an assault that may collapse American democracy as we know it.
Now, I know my Republican friends think this is hyperbole, that our fear for our democracy is just fearmongering, just politics. I swear it is not.
Our Republican colleagues know why Comey and Senator Schiff and Soros are being targeted. They know that the President just picked the people that give him the hardest time and told his folks to come up with charges.
My Republican colleagues know the impact that this has on people who want to politically and peacefully oppose the President but now won't do that because they fear for their freedom. Republicans know this. They should not defend it.
Republicans know that it is wrong to sit down and agree to a budget and then cheer the President when he refuses to spend the money in blue States or on the priorities that got Democrats to sit down at the table to begin with. Republicans know that is not fair play. They shouldn't defend it.
Republicans know that using the FCC to crack down on speech that the President doesn't agree with is wrong. They know, as Senator Cruz pointed out, that is a slippery slope we may never get off.
I want to find agreement with the Republicans on stopping these premiums from going up. I do. I think that is really important for people in this country. And I think it is OK to admit that this is an odd arrangement that we have in American Government
How do Republicans expect us to vote for a budget that funds a government that is lawlessly pursuing Democrats, that is arresting and harassing our members and our allies, that is deploying the Army and masked officers to our cities?
We are at a moment of decision for this country. Right now, Republicans aren't even trying to keep the government open. They are not even here.
They are not even here. They are rooting for a shutdown.
But if we are going to keep the government open, why can't we all agree that it should only be a government that respects our democracy, that is not corrupt, that doesn't treat people and places that oppose President Trump as enemies deserving of indictment or military deployment. That also seems like a pretty minimalist ask.
So it is decision time: Is this Senate going to fund the destruction of our democracy or are we going to do what is necessary to stand up for basic American values?
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, I am honored to follow my colleague from Connecticut and to build on some of the arguments that he has made so well. We are here because our democracy is in crisis. It is not some potential catastrophe on the horizon that is distant or hypothetical. It is real. It is now because of the lawlessness and recklessness of this administration.
And it is the result of a contempt for the law, for legal norms that, seemingly, is boundless. We have seen it in the Jimmy Kimmel episode where the FCC Chair said, in mobster-like language: They can do it the hard way or the easy way.
``You have a nice restaurant there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.'' I prosecuted mob cases. That is the kind of language we see from organized crime.
And it was shown in the indictment of James Comey, a document signed only by the U.S. attorney, not by any career official, and after only 14 members of the 23 people on that Grand Jury voted to do it on two of the counts, rejecting a third.
All of this kind of procedure is so highly extraordinary. As a former prosecutor, it would be an embarrassment. But this administration is beyond shame when it comes to lawlessness.
And we have seen it in immigration, in healthcare, in education, in the VA, where countless people have been illegally fired, some of them hired back.
And that is why we are insisting that there be a guarantee that the President will follow the law when we pass a budget. It is not a hypothetical danger that he will disobey it. In fact, he has ordered rescissions, impoundments, clawbacks. If we pass a law, we have to be sure the President will follow it. Otherwise, there really isn't any point to this branch of government.
And so I say to my Republican colleagues, as a matter of your self- respect, as a matter of protecting this institution, you should agree with us that there must be a guarantee that the rule of law will prevail.
And I say to my constituents in Connecticut: We are going to stand up for you to save your healthcare because you can't wait to get sick. You don't choose to get sick on November 22 or January 3 when it is convenient for Donald Trump and the Republican majority.
You need to know, when there is open enrollment on November 1, whether or not your insurance will be affordable for you. You need to know whether those subsidies will make it affordable for you because otherwise you won't be able to buy insurance through the ACA. In fact, 90 percent of all people in Connecticut who buy insurance through the ACA marketplace receive some kind of subsidy, and their insurance premiums will skyrocket by 75 percent if that subsidy is ended. They need to know now, when open enrollment starts, whether those subsidies will be there for them.
And it will affect insurance premiums for everyone if we fail to extend those subsidies as part of this continuing resolution now. Why? Because healthier people who see their insurance premiums rise by 20 percent--right now, they are projected to rise at least 18 percent for everyone because that is the cost of this failure to extend the subsidies. The healthier people are going to say: I am not bothering. I won't need it.
The sicker people may try to buy it, and the insurance companies will have to cover illnesses, more of them, with fewer premiums, and they will have to charge more to everyone to cover it.
So this failure to do the right thing has impacts for everyone who seeks healthcare and tries to buy insurance to pay for it.
The Republican proposal is an abject failure when it comes to ensuring that the American people don't pay more for healthcare. And I heard from constituents just over this past weekend as I went to the Durham Fair, as I went to the mum parade in Bristol, as I went to Norwalk and Stamford and Milford, all around the State, people asking me: What will happen to my health insurance? What will happen to my healthcare?
Nothing is more important than health, and we are saving healthcare for the American people by insisting that this extension of government funding include a reversal of the cruel and stupid ``Big Blatant Betrayal''--it is not a Big Beautiful Bill, the ``Big Blatant Betrayal'' that failed to extend those healthcare subsidies--and insist that whatever bill that is passed be obeyed by the President.
The ACA premium tax credits have protected millions of Americans from those higher healthcare costs, and they have reduced the numbers of Americans without health insurance coverage. They have provided robust choices for consumers and provided stability for healthcare providers, especially in rural areas.
And I have heard from those providers who are as worried as their patients about what will happen to this program.
What the Republicans are doing is cruel. It is unnecessary. There is a straightforward, simple solution. It should not be a partisan issue. Republicans know we have to extend those subsidies. Why not now? That is the mystery to the American people.
And there will be no credit for a shutdown. The American people know that we are not seeking it. We hope to avoid it. It will be on Republicans who have refused to come to the table. House Republicans have refused even to come to town, come back to go into session, and they are having discussions, reportedly, about whether they can have fundraisers during the shutdown if there is one.
So we need some wiser heads and stronger conscience to prevail, and I am hopeful there is still time to reach that kind of agreement.
I choose to stand with working families, and I urge my Republicans to do the same.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The minority whip.
Mr. President, millions of Americans better check their mailbox over the next week or two. There is some bad news. Letters are being sent by health insurance companies that are trying to give some kind of a warning to these families about what is going to happen to their health insurance premiums because of the big beautiful Trump budget bill.
One family in Illinois tells the story, Leighanne Safford and her husband Lorry. Right now, Leighanne and Lorry pay $278 a month for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. But starting January 1, their monthly premiums--now get this--jump from $278 a month to $1,800 a month, a 550-percent increase--$1,500 more coming out of the paychecks of Lorry and Leighanne.
Why is this happening? Because we have a system, or had a system, that provided subsidies and tax credits to working families so that they could afford their health insurance. However, in the big beautiful budget bill of Donald Trump--passed with every Republican voting for it, every Democrat voting against it--these subsidies and credits started to disappear.
Thanks to President Biden and a Democratic Congress, those credits were there for families that they could count on. Because of the Republican decision with President Trump to give tax breaks to the wealthiest people in America, they cut back on the premium assistance that was available to the Safford family.
These credits had opened the door to millions of working and middle- class Americans like Leighanne and Lorry to be able to afford quality health insurance.
Now they have got to make a choice. This is a lot of money--$1,500 a month. Millions of Americans will decide: Are we going to cut back on essentials like food and dental or switch to a higher deductible plan, more money out-of-pocket if anybody gets sick? Leighanne said:
That is the same bind that millions of Americans are going to face because of the Republican decision to give a tax break to the wealthiest people in America.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, more than 4 million American families are going to lose their health insurance if Congressional Republicans allow these subsidies to expire, and that is what is going to happen if we don't change, including more than 100,000 in my State of Illinois.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can extend these tax credits and still fund government.
I remember a time in this Chamber when Democrats and Republicans came together on a bipartisan basis when real family challenges existed and tried to solve the problem. We just don't have that spirit here anymore. They have decided on the Republican side, we are going to give tax breaks to these wealthy people, even at the expense of working families.
And we have a President hell-bent on abusing his power and a Republican Congress that refuses to disagree with him.
Earlier this year, President Trump and Republicans in Congress signed into law this Big Beautiful Bill. It cuts nearly a trillion dollars from programs like Medicaid. What is Medicaid important for? Limited- income families and retired individuals.
This big beautiful Republican budget bill cuts nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid and $300 billion from the Food Stamp Program, now known as SNAP.
As a result of their bill, the Republican bill, more than 10 million Americans will lose their health coverage.
Ever had a child who was sick and no health insurance? I have. You will never forget it as long as you live.
This is separate from 4 million others who stand to lose their health coverage if the Republicans continue to block our efforts with the ACA tax credits. It seems Republicans in Congress are fine adding more than 3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years to pay for those tax cuts, but they draw the line at extending healthcare to millions of hard-working Americans.
The math is clear. Republicans don't have the votes to force this extreme agenda. Government requires input from both sides. We are taking a stand for this family and millions more just like them. When they get the jolt of the news of where their health insurance premium is going to go, where do they turn? I hope they can turn to Congress and Members of the Senate who actually care for working families. If we refuse to do the job, Leighanne and Lorry are going to pay the price.
Let's be clear, Democrats stand ready to negotiate on a fair bipartisan basis. The only reason we are staring at this shutdown is because Republicans have refused to come to the table.
There was a meeting at the White House today. Don't let it be the last one. Let's come together and fix this healthcare problem for working families.
The President on FOX News said last week: Don't even bother dealing with the Democrats.
Well, the President is wrong. We are in this together. We need to solve this problem together. If the government shuts down, it will be because of President Trump walking away from a major challenge facing working families.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, one of the things I have had the most trouble understanding in the time that I have been in the Senate has been Republicans' bizarre fascination with attacking healthcare systems, with taking healthcare coverage away from Americans. It came to a boil in the ``Beautiful for Billionaires'' bill--which cut about a trillion dollars out of Medicaid--and, in a hidden fashion through sequester, cut about half a trillion dollars out of Medicare and then attacks the Affordable Care Act, which so many Americans rely on to be able to afford their health insurance.
I represent Rhode Island. Rhode Island is probably going to lose up to $5 billion in Federal Medicaid funding. The Medicare cuts would be probably about half of that. And the Affordable Care Act is going to hit about 40,000 Rhode Islanders who will see their insurance premiums explode. And that is going to happen soon.
This is a healthcare crisis that Republicans have created, and we would like to try to protect the American public in all of this. These are not going to be small increases in people's bills. We are talking about an 85-percent increase in already expensive health insurance premiums, as much as $1,200 a year for a middle-class family.
Let me give you just an example of what this looks like in real life. I have a constituent named Carla. Carla is 60 years old. She is retired. She was a mental health counselor, which is noble work but doesn't make you rich. She gets $60,000 in annual income, mostly from her 401(k). She doesn't yet qualify for Medicare, so she got insurance from the Rhode Island State health insurance marketplace.
She has a family history of heart disease. She has hypertension. When the tax credits under the Affordable Care Act expire at the end of the year, Carla's monthly premium will go from $427 a month to $904 a month. That is more than double. That is a $477 per month increase to the expenses of a woman whose total income is only $60,000 a year.
We ought to be able to solve this. All we are asking for is serious negotiations to address the Republican healthcare crisis or, I guess, if they refuse, the Republican government shutdown. It is very much up to Republicans where we go from here. All the reports are that the meeting between the President and congressional leaders went badly; no progress was made at all.
It is really up to the Republicans. Will they really choose to shut down the U.S. Government just to indulge their bizarre fascination with taking healthcare away from Americans? Aren't we better than that?
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
Mr. President, we are just a day away from a government shutdown because President Trump and Republicans would rather shut down the government than work with us to keep healthcare premiums from spiking for American families. We are watching the same pattern repeat itself again in Washington: partisan politics and dysfunction hurting hard-working families.
This fight is about healthcare. It is about what happens to families in Arizona if tax credits that reduce their healthcare premiums expire. It is about costs going up for people who are already feeling squeezed by inflation and Trump's tariffs driving up the prices of everything from groceries to back-to-school supplies.
And it is not complicated. If these tax credits expire, working families in my State will see their monthly premiums spike when they go to sign up for a new plan in just a few weeks. I have heard from Arizonans who are now saving hundreds of dollars every month because of these credits. Ending them would be a gut punch. For some, it would mean losing their coverage altogether.
It is pretty simple. We should extend them, and that is what we are proposing. Let's not forget who holds the cards: Donald Trump and my Republican colleagues. They are the ones saying no--not just to Democrats, not just to us, but to families in Arizona and across the country.
But instead of working with us to lower costs and avoid a shutdown, Donald Trump has refused to even sit down and talk about it for weeks until just today, barely 24 hours before the deadline. He would rather watch the country inch closer to a shutdown than to try to figure out solutions.
It is going to be everyday Americans who pay the price, your constituents and mine. In Arizona, more than 379,000 people have reduced premiums through these tax credits. It lowers their premium by an average of about $475 every single month. So if those tax credits are allowed to expire, that means their healthcare premiums for next year go up as much as 55 percent. That is hundreds of dollars every single month.
And that blows a huge hole in the family budget. It means canceled family trips. It means not being able to sign your kid up to a sports league. It means taking on more shifts just to cover this added cost. And for a lot of folks, what this means is they will not be able to afford health insurance at all.
The estimate is that more than 109,000 people in Arizona alone would be unable to afford coverage. In the richest country in the history of the world, there is no reason why somebody who is working full time shouldn't be able to afford basic health insurance. No one should be one accident or one unexpected illness away from financial ruin. No one should be unable to take their kid to a doctor when they get sick.
But here we are because of Donald Trump and Republicans. This would hurt even harder in rural Arizona and small towns--places like Cochise, Apache, Navajo, and Santa Cruz Counties where there are fewer large employers who offer health benefits. But these are counties with higher poverty rates. It will hurt families across Arizona who finally-- finally--got access to care and now they are being told that it may disappear.
It doesn't have to be this way. There is still time to extend the premium tax credits and protect families from higher costs while keeping the Federal Government open and serving Americans.
Mr. President, we can do this. We just have to be willing to sit down and work to figure it out. I know I am.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
We are behind schedule, so I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 25 minutes before taking the vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Eliminate Shutdowns Act (Executive Session)
Mr. President, I will ask you, I ask anybody in the Chamber, anybody who will listen to me on C-SPAN: Aren't you getting sick and tired of these government shutdown showdowns--with the drama, the turmoil, partisan bickering, the holding American people and our economy hostage for demands for billions and billions of dollars and more spending that we can't afford?
I know I am. This madness doesn't have to continue. We can begin ending this madness tonight by voting on a very simple piece of legislation: Eliminate Shutdowns Act.
Again, it is very simple. All it does is say, if we don't pass appropriations bills for all of government or any department, we don't shut those departments down. We don't shut all of government down. We do, literally, what the State of Wisconsin has done since the 1950s: We keep spending at last year's levels. I mean, how more common sense can you get?
We accomplish that by enacting 2-week rolling continuing appropriations to fund all of government or any part of it that doesn't have an appropriation passed for it on a rolling basis. I ask the Chamber: Who could be opposed to something so simple that, again, it prevents all this turmoil, all this drama, all this partisan bickering?
Well, my guess is Democrats will oppose it. My guess is also some of our appropriators will oppose it. I have heard some of the rationale. I don't think it really holds water. But what one point made is the problem with continuing resolutions is they fund programs that should be reduced or canceled and prevent important new programs from being started.
Well, again, that will create the incentive--I agree with that, by the way; I don't like CRs either--that will create the incentive, under these automatic rolling 14-day continuing appropriations, to pass appropriations bills. It doesn't in any way, shape, or form diminish or detract from the authority of appropriators or the Appropriations Committee.
I also heard the appropriators want the pressure of government shutdowns to allow them to pass appropriation bills. I guess I somewhat understand their point. But I would like to point out that pressure certainly hasn't worked.
I got here in the year 2011. I don't think anybody can dispute the fact that at least since that point in time--and probably before that-- the appropriations process is broken. It is dysfunctional.
In 15 years, what we should have done in Congress is pass 180 appropriations bills during those 15 years: 12 a year times 15--180 bills. Do you know how many we actually have passed? Six--six bills-- one for fiscal year 2017, five for fiscal year 2019--six bills. That is a 3.3-percent success rate or, stated a better way, that is a 96.7- percent failure rate of the appropriations process.
During that 15 years, we have had three shutdowns, and we have passed 55 continuing resolutions--55. And people are going to oppose an automatic rolling continuing appropriation? By the way, this year, the continuing resolution that we did pass took us 6 months. It took us 6 months of dysfunction before we finally passed the appropriations for this year, which, of course, is going to end in a day and a half.
What the shutdown pressure did produce is the pressure to mortgage our children's future for it. It produced the pressure to pass multiple, thousand-page omnibus spending bills. We have increased or suspended the debt ceiling 12 times in those 15 years, since I have been here. Our debt has gone from $14 trillion to over $37 trillion. Clearly, this is a broken process. Spending is completely out of control.
I don't think it is going to surprise anybody to find out that I brought a couple of charts to basically make my point. I would like to talk about a few facts, a few figures. This Chamber is generally not really interested in talking about, like, figures, but with my accounting background, I would like to. So let me give you a little history lesson. This dates back--these are 4-year average deficits going back to the year 2001.
You will see, in the two terms of President Bush's administrations, average deficits were $200 billion and $300 billion. So the average over his 8 years is $250 billion worth of deficits. Again, those were unacceptably high back then. That is when $100 billion or 2, actually, was real money. People were concerned about it.
President Obama came into office with the great recession. As his adviser Rahm Emanuel said, ``Never let a good crisis go to waste.'' And he didn't. So, in his first term, President Obama's average deficit was $1.27 trillion. That sparked the Tea Party movement. I am part of that. When the Tea Party came, we actually made a difference. We did dig our heels in on that out-of-control deficit spending. So for President Obama's second term, deficits averaged $550 billion. Again, $550 billion--that is a lot of money, except in Washington, DC.
President Trump came into office with a divided government, and he had to do deals to get spending bills passed. So his deficit increased to $810 billion for the first 3 years. Then COVID hit. We went on a massive, bipartisan, ``uniparty'' spending spree: a $3.1 trillion a year deficit--$3.1 trillion. We went from $4.4 trillion in spending to 6.5 and never looked back.
Now, responsible leaders would have recognized that that was an aberration. We can't keep spending once the pandemic has passed.
You know, back in World War II, we had responsibilities. We started World War II by spending 11.7 percent of GDP. During World War II, that increased to 41 percent for the war effort, but responsible leadership brought that spending back down to 11.4 percent of GDP, after the war, in 1948.
That is not what the Biden administration did. They kept spending at pandemic levels. We averaged, during the Biden administration, deficits of $1.9 trillion, and we will have a deficit this year of about $2 trillion.
And the very sad fact is, over the next 10 years, based on the CBO's most recent figures, the total 10-year deficit is going to equal about $26.4 trillion. That is $2.6 trillion per year. It starts out at about $2 trillion and ramps up to over $3 trillion by the year 2035.
Most of our party leadership says the problem here is we have a spending problem. We don't have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem. Let me just prove that point.
This is one of my favorite charts. It literally shows that no matter how much we try and punish success with the top marginal tax rate--we had, back in 1959, a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent. How much would you work if the Federal Government took 91 cents of every dollar you made? I wouldn't work very hard, personally. It has been as low as 28 percent. I would say, for a brief period of time, we were 72 percent free under Ronald Reagan. Now we are at 37 percent for the top marginal tax rate. But, again, you can see the ups and downs.
What is noteworthy about this chart is that no matter how much you try and punish success, over time, it has been very consistent. We were able to extract 17.1 percent of the American economy in Federal revenue. We have had a high of 20 percent, but that was after the dot- com bubble, and that quickly came back down to a 17.1-percent average.
It is time we recognized that reality. If we ever balance our budget, what we need to do is get spending under control. We have a spending problem, which I think this chart clearly demonstrates.
Back in 2000, we spent $1.8 trillion--$1.8 trillion. That was 17.7 percent of GDP. That was the year that we had 20 percent of revenue. We had a surplus for 4 years. We had a surplus for 4 years, and we frittered that all away. We finally broke the $2 trillion mark in the year 2002, after 9/11. All of a sudden, we were on a war footing. We had to spend more to defend this Nation. Again, we have never looked back.
The absolute high point--other than World War II, the high point in spending was with President Obama, after the great recession, at 24.4 percent of GDP. By the way, that year, because of the recession, revenue went down to 14.4 percent. That is what produced those massive deficits of $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion.
In 2014--again, as a result of the Tea Party--we pretty well held spending flat at about $3.5 trillion for about 5 or 6 years. So spending, as a percent of GDP, which is a relevant figure, dropped down to 20.2. This year, we are going to be spending over $7 trillion-- greater than 23 percent of our economy--and we are going to collect about 17.1 percent. We have got in excess of a 6-percent structural deficit. It is clearly unsustainable.
I hear a lot of talk about, ``Well, Ron, it is all mandatory spending,'' which is a problem. All of these government shutdowns are all about 25 percent of Federal spending--the discretionary accounts. We have 75 percent of our spending in mandatory, but you have to understand this is not all Social Security, Medicare, or even Medicaid.
Over the decades--I am researching to see exactly how this happened-- we have transferred what I would consider and what probably formerly was discretionary spending into other mandatory. So, this year, we will spend about $1 trillion in other mandatory spending. What this chart shows are the variants between 2019 spending, plussed up for population and inflation, leaving Social Security and Medicare and interest alone with spending at 2025 levels. If we were to do that, instead of spending $7 trillion this year, we would be spending about 6.5. In other mandatory--again, not Social Security and Medicare or even Medicaid--we are spending $239 billion more than inflation and population adjusted for 2019 spending. I don't think we were spending too little in 2019. Nondefense discretionary is up about $145 billion over fully inflated 2019 levels. So that is not the problem.
There is just one other fact I want to dispute, particularly for defense hawks in my party, because I hear it a lot.
Well, the good news is we have got parity between defense spending and domestic spending. I don't know what figures they are looking at, but if you only consider nondefense discretionary--yes, it increased from Bill Clinton--it is pretty close to 1 to 1. But that was before 9/ 11, before we were on a war footing. Under Trump, it is 1.64 to 1. But, again, you can't ignore the other mandatory--that other trillion dollars--nowadays. If you factor in nondefense discretionary and other mandatory, we have increased spending on domestic programs 2\1/2\ times to 1. In defense, from Obama's spending, the increase is 3\1/2\ times to 1. Under Trump, it is 3.65. So we don't have parity.
I am sorry, defense hawks. You have had--you know, lights out. You have lost that battle. We are not even close to parity. Whatever you think you are getting in defense, they are getting 3\1/2\ times that in domestic spending. Again, we can't afford it.
So, again, those are just some basic facts, some basic figures that explain our current fiscal situation. Let me go back to where I started.
Here we are again in another shutdown showdown. The Democrats' opening bid, by the way, was: OK, well, we will give you a 4-week CR--4 weeks--and all we are asking is for another $1.5 trillion in spending. So we are willing to end the turmoil, and we will quit playing games with people's lives for 4 weeks, as long as you agree to roll back everything you passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill and increase spending by $1.5 trillion.
Is that a serious starting negotiation point? I don't think so.
What I am asking from all of my colleagues is, please, imagine a world in which these ridiculous shutdowns are no more than a ridiculous relic of the past, where we are not wasting our time and effort and energy and angst over this partisan bickering.
Again, I have to remind you that the Eliminate Shutdowns Act does not diminish the authority of the Appropriations Committee. If we do these rolling continuing appropriations, now the appropriators can get together, and they can find areas of agreement, like we did in this Chamber on Veterans Affairs and Military Construction, in that minibus. Where there are areas of disagreement, we will take some time and find the compromises.
As I said, I agree with the point that the problem with CRs is that they fund programs that should be reduced or canceled, and they prevent important new programs from being started. There, again, is another incentive to do appropriations, and now you have the time to do it. We won't be wasting our time and effort and energy and angst on these charades. These are charades.
I can't predict exactly what will happen if we pass the Eliminate Shutdowns Act. Nobody can. I can predict we will never have another shutdown--ever--in the Federal Government. I am OK with that. Again, I don't like CRs. I don't like our current spending level. I am willing to concede much higher spending levels than I think we can afford to eliminate government shutdowns for all times. So I can predict that.
But here is something else I think could happen: If we are not wasting our time on this partisan bickering over shutdowns, there have been so many discussions about bipartisan appropriations and budget reform, things like 2-year appropriations cycles, where, instead of 12 bills, which, obviously, we can't pass, how about doing 6 and making it manageable? In the year you don't appropriate for an account, you are doing oversight, and just reverse the cycle. I mean, I would even consider 3-year appropriations bills--4 a year--but that could impinge on future Congresses.
Again, I understand there are complications to all of these things, but think positively about what ending shutdowns could do for this body, for this government, for people's lives.
Passing the Eliminate Shutdowns Act, eliminating shutdowns for all time, would be a signature achievement of this Congress. Think of that. We together, on a bipartisan basis, can say we are the group after the horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk. Recognize this is the moment to come together as a nation, as a Senate, as a Congress. Do the right thing for the American people. End government shutdowns. That would be a signature achievement in this Congress, and I am hoping and praying that we do that. But let me be honest. Voting no on this bill--voting no is basically voting yes for continuing the chaos and for continuing to play partisan games with
So, again, I urge all of my colleagues, please put the partisanship aside. Recognize the value of eliminating shutdowns and vote yes on this very simple, very commonsense bill that I think quite honestly the American people want to see passed.
With just a couple more minutes, I sat in the Chamber, and I listened to all the arguments about the ObamaCare subsidies--the temporary, COVID, enhanced ObamaCare subsidies. Nobody is talking about doing away with the ObamaCare subsidies. But for sure it should be pointed out that the reason health insurance is so expensive on the individual market is because of the faulty design of ObamaCare.
We had high-risk pools to take care of people with preexisting conditions. It needed a couple of tweaks to cover everybody. But that wasn't good enough for Democrats because they want a single-payer system, so they threw out and outlawed high-risk pools, and in its place forced people on the individual insurance market to pick up the full cost of covering people with preexisting conditions. That caused insurance rates on the individual market to skyrocket. That is why insurance prices continue to skyrocket on the individual market in particular.
What Democrats did during COVID is they basically removed any participation in the ObamaCare exchanges from many millions of people who qualified. The result of that is massive fraud. You have unscrupulous agents and brokers who are signing people up, just using their name and their birth date, for health insurance that these people don't even know they are signed up for. So they don't make claims. Something like 12 million people on the ObamaCare exchanges out of 20\1/2\ million had no claims. It is typical that maybe 10 to 15 percent of people on insurance don't make claims because they are healthy but 12 million out of 20\1/2\? That means 6 million don't even know they have a policy.
So we are literally pouring tens of billions of dollars per year into insurance companies for policies for people that they don't even know they have and they don't use them, while we are paying commissions to those dishonest brokers. That is a massive level of fraud that apparently Democrats have no problem perpetuating. Republicans have a problem with that. We want to lower premiums by doing commonsense reforms and repairing the damage done by ObamaCare.
Again, I think what I heard on the floor needed some response. That is my response to that.
I will just end again by encouraging all of my colleagues--the American people don't like these shutdowns. They want them ended. We have a very simple bill--not partisan--that really offers no advantage to anybody, which is perfect. It just keeps the government open. It gives appropriators time to do appropriating, appropriate those Departments, and end all the chaos and all the turmoil and all the playing games with people's lives.
With that, I yield the floor.
