| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Delivers the important services that they expect their government to deliver. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Hello, everybody. | ||
| I'm proud to be joined by Senators Murray and Merkley, the dynamic M ⁇ M duo. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| No, the Northwest. | ||
| Northwest Dynamic Duo. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, this week will mark one month since Donald Trump was sworn in as president. | ||
| In the first month, Donald Trump has waged a scorched earth campaign against the rule of law. | ||
| And for one simple reason. | ||
| To give his billionaire buddies a tax break and have the American people pay the cost. | ||
| House Republicans say one bill. | ||
| Senate Republicans say two bills. | ||
| Donald Trump, meanwhile, is changing his mind every hour. | ||
| Yesterday, Senate Republicans voted to proceed on their budget resolution. | ||
| But this morning you saw that President Trump flipped the script again, further sowing chaos. | ||
| Republicans have talked a big game about flooding the zone, but instead they're drowning in their own chaos and confusion. | ||
| If this mess Republicans have created for themselves is a preview of how they'll govern, it bodes very poorly for them, but more importantly, for the country. | ||
| Of course, Republicans could do two bills. | ||
| They could do 10 bills. | ||
| They could do 50 bills, 100 bills. | ||
| It doesn't make a difference because the one thing they're united on, the one thing they're trying to get done, House and Senate Republicans, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, is to give their billionaire buddies a tax break and have the American people pay the cost, no matter what it is. | ||
| Senate Democrats will expose Republicans' reconciliation budget bill exactly for what it is. | ||
| A sinister front for clearing the way to cut taxes for Donald Trump's billionaire buddies. | ||
| Now, this is going to be a long, drawn-out fight. | ||
| The reconciliation budget bill is only the first step, albeit an important one. | ||
| Democrats are glad to have this debate with the Republicans. | ||
| We'll show the hollowness of the Republican arguments on cutting waste. | ||
| We'll expose Republican attempts to cut health care so they can help their billionaire budgies. | ||
| We'll expose their attempts to cut Medicaid, cut housing, cut NIH, empower Doge, all for one purpose, helping their billionaire buddies with another tax break. | ||
| Now they're going to try to change the subject. | ||
| Sure, Donald Trump's trying to divert Gulf of America, built hotels in Gaza, annexing Canada. | ||
| These are distractions that they do to hide the truth because they know how unpopular their tax policy is. | ||
| It was unpopular in 2017, but because such a small group of very wealthy people who don't want to pay taxes have such ironclad control over the Republican Party, they're going at it again. | ||
| Senate Democrats won't relent. | ||
| We're going to continue to expose the Republicans for what they are in giving tax breaks for billionaires. | ||
| We're going to do it in reconciliation. | ||
| We're going to do it in the budget and throughout the months and years ahead, because the bottom line is very simple. | ||
| The last thing Americans want to see is a tax break for billionaires. | ||
| Patty. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Well, Trump is tossing our bipartisan funding law into the shredder and Elon is decimating agencies with really zero concept of what our federal workers actually do, whether it's managing the nuclear weapons stockpile or responding to bird flu. | ||
| Senate Republicans are positively sprinting to make trillions in cuts that will hurt red and blue states so they can shower more tax cuts onto the richest people in the world. | ||
| It is no mystery why billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk love this plan. | ||
| They are getting all the benefits, but they aren't the ones footing the bill. | ||
| Middle-class Americans will pay for Republicans' billionaire tax cuts, and the cost will be measured in shuttered family farms, families and kids kicked off Medicaid, losing their health care, and veterans losing out on hard-earned benefits. | ||
| That is so backwards. | ||
| We should not be taking food off of the family table to put more fuel into private jets. | ||
| I grew up in a family that knew what it was like to fall on hard times. | ||
| My dad was a World War II veteran. | ||
| He got too sick to work. | ||
| He had MS. My mom had to work really hard to keep us afloat with my dad's VA benefits and food stamps and the new job that she got thanks to a federal workforce program. | ||
| It was not easy, but our government was there for them when the hard times came. | ||
| I know families are struggling now, just like my family struggled then. | ||
| I hear from them every day. | ||
| They are working so hard. | ||
| They play by the rules, and they deserve, at the very least, the same opportunity my parents had when I was growing up. | ||
| And I am not going to stand by silently while Republicans try to sell that opportunity away to pay for more tax breaks for billionaires. | ||
| Senate Democrats are going to make sure the American people know this is the most flat-out pro-billionaire, anti-middle-class budget we have ever seen. | ||
| There is zero chance we're going to let Republicans pass this pro-billionaire budget the easy way without a fight. | ||
| We're going to put them on the record for everything Trump and Elon are doing to create real fraud, waste and abuse. | ||
| We are going to make sure the people back home know that Elon Musk is firing VA doctors and food safety inspectors for no cause whatsoever and illegally defunding the programs that Americans care about. | ||
| Republicans will have to answer. | ||
| Are they for protecting Medicaid or for letting kids and seniors lose their health care? | ||
| Are they for supporting our veterans or for cutting their benefits? | ||
| Because these are the kinds of real choices they will have to make with the budget that they are laying out. | ||
| They better get ready for a late night and a long morning. | ||
| Senator Merkel, the ranking member of our budget committee. | ||
| Families lose and billionaires win. | ||
| That's the heart and soul of the Republican budget resolution. | ||
| Now, there's nothing beautiful about families losing and billionaires winning. | ||
| There's nothing beautiful about programs that are designed or plans designed to cut the programs that families depend on to thrive and move into the middle class. | ||
| There's nothing beautiful about giving away the National Treasury and funding additional tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting programs for families. | ||
| But Trump said again in his tweet this morning, it's a big, beautiful bill. | ||
| Well, we're here to say there is nothing beautiful about this bill. | ||
| There is nothing beautiful about cutting Medicaid for millions of American families struggling to be on their feet and have the health care they need so that they can indeed get back into the middle class. | ||
| There's nothing beautiful about cutting the tax credits for middle-class families to buy insurance, health insurance on the exchange. | ||
| Health insurance should be a right, not a privilege of being rich. | ||
| There is nothing beautiful about cutting school lunches or Head Start or making college more expensive as the first member of my family to be able to go to college. | ||
| It means a lot to have opportunity for every child in America, making it harder to go down that path. | ||
| That's a terrible direction. | ||
| In the budget committee, we put forward provision after provision and said, if you don't want to hurt families by cutting Medicaid, then vote for our amendment that says Medicaid will be protected. | ||
| Democrats said yes. | ||
| Republicans said no. | ||
| We said, if you don't want to hurt Head Start, vote with us. | ||
| We said protect Head Start. | ||
| Republicans said no. | ||
| And so on and so forth. | ||
| So we know where this is headed, and we are adamantly opposed to this attack on families across America. | ||
| So America, Democrats are going to stand strong for the families and against gutting those programs for families to stand on their feet so that they can fund tax giveaways to the richest Americans. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Mr. Speaker, is it the belief of the claws that there is wasteful spending in government that needs to be cut? | ||
| Do you agree with those in that sense? | ||
| Of course there's some wasteful spending, but you don't use a meat acts and cut everything. | ||
| We need to look at each program. | ||
| We need to go through Congress and see what's wasteful and move to eliminate it and what's very not wasteful but very much needed. | ||
| I'll give you one example. | ||
| They went after community health centers in Medicaid. | ||
| They're among the most efficient producers of health care we have, yet they tried to eliminate them. | ||
| Makes no sense. | ||
| They're just using a meat axe and cutting everything, including many things that American families need, want and approve of. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've already introduced one bill, I believe, dealing with access to Treasury Department data. | |
| What else do you intend to do to interrupt this purge? | ||
| And is there a sense that this body, this constitutional body, has handed off its Article 1 powers, not just to the executive, but to the judiciary, to the Congress? | ||
| Well, the bottom line is we Democrats, the Republicans seem to be going along in the Senate and elsewhere with things that they know are wrong. | ||
| And hopefully at some point they may join us, but they sure haven't yet. | ||
| So we're going on our own and we're pursuing this in four ways. | ||
| One, communicating to the American people how bad this is so that they can communicate that to the Republican senators who thus far seem to be going along with it. | ||
| Two, legal. | ||
| We've had a lot of success on the legal front. | ||
| We're working with the AGs. | ||
| We're working with other groups. | ||
| And in fact, three-quarters of the cases that have gone before the courts, we have gotten TROs. | ||
| Now they still have to litigate the whole issue, but we've gotten TROs. | ||
| Third is oversight. | ||
| We have our portal, our portal for those whistleblowers, a whistleblower portal who wants to report things in. | ||
| We've gotten thousands of examples. | ||
| And we have strike forces that are going to hold hearings, spotlight hearings, to point this up. | ||
| And the fourth is legislation, where we'll try to do whatever we can legislatively. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And this is something Senator Murray alluded to. | ||
| You said it's going to be a long night and early morning here. | ||
| What do we expect legislatively in terms of these amendments during the voter? | ||
| Will you focus on Doge? | ||
| Will you focus on the budget itself, the tax cuts? | ||
| Stay tuned, but yes, the answer to all three is yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, what's your response to President Trump doing congressional congestion pricing against Dan Manhattan at all in New York and saved along with the campaign? | |
| Yeah, I haven't seen the letter yet. | ||
| I have to look at it. | ||
| It's a five-page letter. | ||
| Thank you, everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to give remarks on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. | |
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