National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I wish to thank my colleague from Virginia for his personal, compelling reason why what the administration is doing is so wrong. That could happen to anyone, and does happen to everyone, and I so appreciate that.

I thank my colleague from Connecticut for bringing us together today to highlight this. There is so much going on in the country, and we don't want this to get lost because it will impact every single family.

We are here today to talk about President Trump's ongoing effort to sabotage healthcare for literally millions of families in our country. As we talked about last week, the Trump-Pence administration showed, once again, that there is no limit to how low and how baseless they will go to appeal to extreme Republican donors and their special interests.

President Trump's Department of Justice announced it will ignore years of precedent and abandon its duty to defend our laws in court. It will abandon our laws that prevent insurers from denying people with preexisting conditions coverage or charging people more because of their gender or raising premiums without limit for seniors.

This decision also makes it clear President Trump is ignoring the lessons he should have learned last year. Around this time last year, Republicans were trying to jam through the President's partisan healthcare bill, filled with proposals that would have scrapped those patient protections, spiked premiums and healthcare costs, imposed an age tax on our seniors, gutted Medicaid, and thrown our entire healthcare system into chaos.

The TrumpCare bill ultimately failed as people across the country stood up, spoke out loudly, and made it very clear they didn't support President Trump's sabotage agenda. President Trump didn't listen. Instead, he has continued to undermine healthcare for our families at every available opportunity, and Republicans have been lockstep with them the entire way; like when President Trump expanded loopholes to allow junk insurance plans that don't include important consumer protections; like when congressional Republicans jammed through a partisan tax bill to undermine our healthcare laws; like when President Trump announced radical new restrictions on Federal family planning funding based on ideology that would result in less access to healthcare for millions of women across the Nation and a gag rule that will interfere with providers' ability to talk about the full range of reproductive health service with their patients. Those steps were all designed to make it harder for women and families to get the care they need.

Last week, President Trump's administration took yet another step to undermine the healthcare system. In a nearly unprecedented move, the Trump administration announced it would no longer defend the Affordable Care Act in court. The Trump administration announced it would abandon the parts of the law that prevent healthcare discrimination against women, against seniors, and against those with preexisting conditions. That decision goes against years of legal precedent. It goes against, for sure, the wishes of families across the country who want their government to care about patients, not partisan politics. It even goes against the promises of many Republicans who claimed they were going to fight for those important patient protections.

Republicans may not be listening, but I have to tell you, families across the country have been speaking up loud and clear. They want us to fight for them and for their healthcare policies that can help them get the care they need. While President Trump and Attorney General Sessions have never fought for patients--as their latest decision makes abundantly clear--Democrats have never stopped fighting for them, and we are not going to stop now.

We remain dedicated to working toward commonsense solutions that help bring our healthcare costs down and begin to fix some of this damage that has been done by President Trump. We actually had a bipartisan deal that would have accomplished that goal, but, unfortunately, Republican leaders made very clear from the start they are not interested in lowering premiums, they are not interested in stabilizing our marketplace, and they are not interested in fixing this problem. Instead, they are interested in helping special interests, they are interested in donors, and they are interested in catering to the extreme right.

Despite their move to throw a wrench in our important bipartisan work, I want you to know Democrats are at the table, and we will be here all of August ready to work to fix this for families in Washington State and across the country. I hope, going forward, cooler heads will prevail and Republicans will return to the table and join us on finding solutions to lower patients' costs and strengthen healthcare in our country rather than continuing to help President Trump sabotage it. That is what the people in my State want. I know that is what families across the country want.

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