| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
With their complaints here, how are you confident that you'll have the 50 votes each? | |
| Well, I just think when push comes to shove, you're looking at whether or not you're going to allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. | ||
| And there are a lot of things in this bill, as I pointed out. | ||
| It modernizes the military, it secures the border, it brings tax relief to working families, it has the biggest spending reduction in history, and it restores energy dominance for our country. | ||
| I mean, I think there is so much good in this, and people sit down and evaluate how they're going to land in the end. | ||
| You have to recognize that this is a process whereby everybody doesn't get everything they want. | ||
| But I think we produced a bill working with the House, working with the White House, that will get the requisite number of Republican senators to vote for it so that we can pass it, get it back to the House. | ||
| Hopefully they can take it up and pass it and put it on the president's desk. | ||
| Okay, I'm proud to have my staff join me in this press conference. | ||
| Where's Jeff? | ||
| Right here. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Thanks, Jeff, for joining us today. | ||
| Well, one thing has become clear: the more Americans learn about this big, ugly bill, the more they hate it. | ||
| We just saw polling data in our caucus that showed two to one people don't like the bill, a majority of Democrats, of course, but a significant majority of Independents, and a significant chunk of Republicans. | ||
| Our Republican colleagues are also starting to see how devastating this bill is. | ||
| Look no further than my good friend, Senator Tillis. | ||
| Where's our busy talking? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You going to hold it, Gracie, or I hold it? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So let me just, I'll do it. | ||
| So this is a chart that he gave out in his caucus, according to Punchbowl. | ||
| He handed out this sheet that says exactly what's in the bill. | ||
| Thanks, Jeff. | ||
| How much you lose with the provider rate tax, each state. | ||
| Louisiana, $20 billion. | ||
| South Carolina, $20 billion. | ||
| Tennessee, $16 billion. | ||
| Kentucky, $12 billion. | ||
| Ohio, $8.4. | ||
| West Virginia, $6.2. | ||
| Missouri, $6.1. | ||
| And Iowa, $4.1. | ||
| And North Carolina, $38 billion. | ||
| That's a lot of money for anybody. | ||
| And so in the caucus, he's handing this out. | ||
| Republicans are really beginning to learn how bad the big, ugly bill is for them. | ||
| Tillis is actually right. | ||
| I agree with him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It'd be catastrophic for North Carolina with Medicaid coverage at risk for over 600,000 people and forfeiting over $38 billion to his home state. | ||
| And he's not the only one. | ||
| Republican senators are airing deep concerns behind closed doors, but they're not being honest at home to their constituents. | ||
| Senate Republicans should listen to Senator Tillis. | ||
| He's right about how devastating this would be. | ||
| Republicans might not want to be honest with the American people in public, but Democrats sure as hell will be now and throughout the summer and on into next year. | ||
| Senate Democrats have been beating the drum, doing our best to reveal exactly what the bill does. | ||
| And the more we learn about the bill, the more awful it is. | ||
| And the more awful it is, the harder we fight. | ||
| And we know the American people are on our side. | ||
| So we know just letting them know what's in the bill is very bad for them and shows what we are for. | ||
| Republicans know that their plan is a debt buster, but they don't seem to care. | ||
| They're lining the pockets of their billionaire buddies, pretending it won't cost billions, trillions rather, by using a budget gimmick. | ||
| And all it is is a gimmick, current policy baseline. | ||
| They can deceive all they want. | ||
| Everyone knows you can push the paper around, but they're actually putting the country in debt with these tax cuts. | ||
| There's less money in the coffers when they cut the taxes, plain and simple. | ||
| And they know that. | ||
| But the debt has a real effect on the American people. | ||
| Costs will go up everywhere. | ||
| The cost to buy a car, the cost to start a business, the cost to buy a home, the cost to retain some debt on your credit card bills. | ||
| Americans are going to be hit hard by the deficit increase alone. | ||
| And that won't change no matter how the Republicans paper it over with this gimmick called current policy baseline. | ||
| So it's evasive. | ||
| Now, finally, I want to emphasize how utterly outrageous it was for the administration to cancel, to cancel the briefing that we were supposed to get at 4 o'clock today. | ||
| The last-minute postponement was just a dereliction of their duty to let the Congress know, to let both parties know in the Congress what's going on over there. | ||
| So what's the administration so afraid of that they don't want to brief us? | ||
| They keep delaying it. | ||
| I asked for this briefing last week. | ||
| It was scheduled last week before United States action in Iran. | ||
| And here, all of a sudden, they cancel it. | ||
| Now they say they want to wait to have Rubio and Hegseth there. | ||
| Rubio and Hegseth were never scheduled. | ||
| And frankly, they want to do that Thursday. | ||
| That's fine, but it should not be a substitute for this serious briefing, but in addition. | ||
| And we know what will happen. | ||
| Hegseth and even Rubio will give us a lot of happy talk, but not the sinew, the details that we need. | ||
| The people coming today, including Major General Kaine, he's known as a straight shooter, would have given us the details we need to know. | ||
| We don't need some canned talk points for Pete Hegseth to roll out. | ||
| If secretaries and Rubio, as I said, want to come, that's fine. | ||
| But what happened today was obstruction that undermines the very principles of democracy. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Where is Leader Thune and the Republicans? | ||
| Why are they not defending the very right and obligation of senators, both Democrat and Republican, to be informed? | ||
| What the heck is going on? | ||
| They are just out of control, violating every precept, every principle, every law, unlike any other administration in American history. | ||
| Senator Merkley. | ||
| You're on this side. | ||
| Well, let's talk about debt. | ||
| The Republicans have become the kings of deficit and debt creation. | ||
| Afghanistan war, Iraq war, the Bush tax cuts, the Trump 1 tax cuts, now the Trump 2 tax cuts. | ||
| But it's not just legislation in which they have driven up the deficits and the debt. | ||
| It's also by modifying and undermining the structure of the process that was designed to control debt, specifically the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Act. | ||
| It was two decades and two years after that bill passed. | ||
| Republicans said, well, this bill, it was only for deficit reduction, but we're going to use it for tax cuts that drive up the deficit. | ||
| Well, that was huge damage to the ability of Congress to make sure that we had a special pathway for reducing deficits. | ||
| Instead, they turned it into a pathway for increasing them and increasing them massively. | ||
| And now we have the Republicans saying, well, there are two things that survived our 1996 massacre of the 1974 Act, and that was there could be no deficits after 10 years, and we'd continue to use honest numbers, honest numbers from the Joint Committee on Taxation, honest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. | ||
| But now the Republicans in the Senate are saying, let's get rid of both of those forms of discipline as well. | ||
| There is a provision in Section 313 that says, absolutely, there can be no deficit creation after the budget window for the reconciliation bill. | ||
| That's a 10-year window. | ||
| But Republicans are, speaking of windows, they're throwing that out the window. | ||
| And the process was designed to create this new organization, Congressional Budget Office, to give us honest numbers. | ||
| Quit lying to ourselves. | ||
| Quit lying to the American people about what things cost. | ||
| Get rid of the smoke and mirrors. | ||
| That was a form of discipline that is also being thrown out with this so-called current policy baseline. | ||
| Now that strategy invented out of thin air by the Republicans comes from Section 312. | ||
| So I just want to encourage you all to be a little bit educated about Section 312. | ||
| This is the history of Section 312. | ||
| One good turn to Zero. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, there we go. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Section 312 has always been used only on a bipartisan basis. | ||
| Section 312 has only been used on very narrow provisions. | ||
| Section 312 has always been resolved in that bipartisan way to resolve a small ambiguity. | ||
| And it has never ever been used in reconciliation because 312 wasn't about reconciliation. | ||
| Section 313 is about reconciliation. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| You do that really well. | ||
| And so let's turn to section 313. | ||
| And what does it say? | ||
| It has five provisions that say, or five elements that say look at each provision and find out how much it changes revenue or how much it changes costs. | ||
| This is the 313. | ||
| I've circled a whole bunch of things here. | ||
| It says check this provision. | ||
| In other words, check what the law, proposed law is, each provision. | ||
| Find out how much it costs or how much revenue it produces or decreases. | ||
| And how do you do that? | ||
| You say, here's the provision, versus if the provision wasn't there. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| That is a comparison to current law. | ||
| So let me be absolutely clear. | ||
| Section 312 has no role in reconciliation. | ||
| It's being used completely out of place, and it's inherently inconsistent. | ||
| Let me give you two examples. | ||
| In the middle of the 10-year window, Republicans are stopping some tax provisions. | ||
| Under their theory of current policy, you would continue to cost those out over the 10-year period because you're assuming that they go on after they are dying in law. | ||
| So they're saying, well, provisions that were in previous law, we're assuming those continue forever, even though the law says they don't. | ||
| And then they're saying provisions that we're creating and saying stop, actually stop. | ||
| Totally inconsistent. | ||
| Or look at another inconsistency. | ||
| Look at that $5 trillion debt ceiling increase they're putting in. | ||
| Why is that there? | ||
| Because the bill increases the debt massively over the couple coming years. | ||
| So just really want to say we are going to contest the obliteration of fiscal discipline. | ||
| We are tired of hearing Republicans say they are champions of fiscal responsibility when they do legislation after legislation that drives us into massive deficit and debts and then proceed to dismantle the bipartisan structure that was designed to create discipline over the budgeting process. | ||
| Thank you, Jeff. | ||
| I just want to show everyone how diligent he is. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Leader Schumer Schumer. | ||
| Questions, stop yelling, stop yelling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is there a way that Democrats can force a ruling against the current policy baseline that Republicans are trying to use? | |
| And did you vote in the New York Mayor Almighty Grace? | ||
| I did vote. | ||
| I was early voting, I think, the first day on Sunday. | ||
| I'm keeping my ballot to myself. | ||
| But the bottom line is that overruling the parliamentarian would be something Thune said he'd never do. | ||
| He always said we'd be for regular order and maintain the filibuster. | ||
| This is in effect, is not maintaining the filibuster because they're doing this in a sneaky way to try and get either a 51 vote or no vote. | ||
| It's violating the filibuster. | ||
| No, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you think the winner of the Democratic Party, though, in New Primary in New York, would that be the only first Senator Republic that stays on the ballot in November? | |
| Let's wait and see the results today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Leader Schumer, what is the Democratic alternative to this bill? | |
| Isn't it correct that without some amendation, we're going to see an increase in both personal and business taxes, regardless of what's bad in the bill? | ||
| Taxes are going to go down. | ||
| Okay, look, the bottom line is you will see in the amendments in reconciliation not only what we oppose in the Republican bill, but some of the things we stand for. | ||
| And the public will see it. | ||
| We just welcome the contrast that this reconciliation bill brings between what the Democrats stand for and what the Republicans stand for. | ||
| Leader Schumer last fall on AI. | ||
| There's a major AI provision in this bill, the 10-year moratorium. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that a good idea to delay that for such a long period of time? | |
| Well, what happened in the moratorium is they withdrew the entire national moratorium. | ||
| They put some strings attached to it. | ||
| There's a great dispute as to what those strings mean. | ||
| Senator Cantwell feels they mean one thing, and Senator Thune thinks they mean another. | ||
| Last one, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If there are amendments to make this bill better on Medicaid, reduce the size of the cuts, would Democrats support it to make the bill less bad? | |
| Look, there's so much bad in the bill. | ||
| It's as bad as the Medicaid is, there are so many other things we oppose. | ||
| Tax cuts for billionaires, as you've heard from us many times. | ||
| So I don't think that would happen. | ||
| We always, of course, we will support. | ||
| We are going to see where we'll have amendments to change the Medicare provisions. | ||
| And we'll see how Republicans, who have always said they don't like this, vote. | ||
| Let me just say one other thing. | ||
| Rural hospitals get clobbered. | ||
| This little fund to help reimburse rural hospitals is just a fraud. | ||
| There won't be even close to enough money to probably reimburse rural hospitals in any of the larger states. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
you. | |
| We'll have more live programming later today with remarks by Vice President JD Vance. | ||
| The former Ohio Senator is back in his home state to attend the Ohio Republican Party dinner. | ||
| Watch live coverage of his remarks when they start, now scheduled for 6:50 p.m. Eastern Time, here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Tonight, voters head to the polls to decide the Democratic nominee running to be the next mayor of New York City. | ||
| Former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democratic Socialist Zorhan Mamdani are currently leading the race of more than a dozen candidates, and the winner is expected to be the favorite to win the general election in November. | ||
| Watch simulcast coverage of the primary results, courtesy of Spectrum News New York One, live at 9 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity, this fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| In a town where partisan fighting prevails, one table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
| This fall, Ceasefire, on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. |