Interior, Environment, Financial Services, and General Government Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, for several weeks, our Republican colleagues have been stonewalling our efforts to gain access to Judge Kavanaugh's full record on behalf of the Senate and, more importantly, on behalf of the American people. In doing so, they have discarded a tradition of bipartisan cooperation when it comes to requesting a nominee's record.

Whether or not you have been for a nominee, we used to all agree that the Senate should be able to review their full record for the sake of transparency and openness, for a vote, to advise and consent on one of the most important jobs in the country and in the world, a lifetime job of tremendous power, not abstract power. The decisions the Supreme Court makes affect the daily lives of Americans. So this is just incredible.

For Justice Kagan, Democrats joined with the Republican minority to request all of her records. For Justice Sotomayor, Democrats did the same. We could have come up with some fake reasons why you couldn't get the records. We didn't. We believe in transparency and openness. But Republicans are doing a 180-degree reverse now that they are in charge, which leaves a very bad taste in our mouths and in the mouths of the American people. They are saying that what is good for the goose is not good for the gander; that transparency is fine when Democrats are in charge and nominating nominees but no transparency when Republicans are in charge.

Republicans are breaking from the bipartisan precedent, and they are requesting only a subset of Judge Kavanaugh's records from his time in the White House. Chairman Grassley has asked for documents pertaining to Judge Kavanaugh's time in the White House Counsel's Office but none from his 3 years as Staff Secretary--arguably a more important and more revealing job.

Now, adding insult to injury--and this is utterly amazing--we have just learned that even when it comes to the documents concerning Kavanaugh's time in the White House Counsel's Office, the Senate is not likely to get the full picture even on that limited group of documents.

Chairman Grassley has written to the National Archives and the Bush Library to request documents from when Kavanaugh was White House Counsel, and both are working to produce them. But, unlike at the National Archives, the Bush Library--and we know President Bush. I have a great deal of respect for him. I think he is a good man even though I disagreed with him on a whole lot. But he is a close friend of Kavanaugh's, who worked for him, and he is a loyal guy.

So what have they done? The Bush Library has hired a legal team--led by a Republican lawyer with close ties to President Bush and President Trump--to prescreen the documents from Kavanaugh's time in the White House Counsel's Office. They are doing the screening--this lawyer who worked for Bannon and who worked for Priebus and so many other Republicans. Pejoratively, you might say he is sort of a hack lawyer. He may be a fine lawyer. But he always works for Republicans. He is a very partisan man, and he is screening the documents that the public can see.

The legal team can cite Executive privilege--that is President Bush's prerogative--to deny the Senate some or all of the documents, and we believe they may be claiming the discretion to determine whether a document is properly considered a Presidential record at all. That is something only the National Archives can do. They are nonpartisan. They don't have any political pull.

The bottom line is this: The Republican lawyers overseeing the production of documents from the Bush Library may seek to deny the Senate access to documents the National Archives would otherwise bring. Is that incredible? So there is another layer. It is not even all the counsel's documents, because there is a lawyer--a tried-and-true doctrinaire Republican lawyer, tight with so many of the people in this administration--who is determining which documents we get to see and which documents we don't.

Knowing that, I recently wrote a letter to President Bush asking him a simple question: Will he, President Bush, make public Judge Kavanaugh's full record or not? I wanted to be sure there would be little or no daylight between what the Senate received from the Bush Library and what we received from the National Archives. Unfortunately, I did not get a simple answer; I got a reply from the lawyer hired by the Bush Library, draped in legalese and obfuscations, confirming that a team of private-sector lawyers are screening the documents--the limited number of documents--from when Kavanaugh was White House Counsel. He also made clear that ``copies of records that the team of lawyers has reviewed and . . . approved for disclosure'' would be made ``available directly to the Committee.'' That is in this letter right here sent by the lawyers.

Ironically, this offer was presented as a courtesy. Of course, it is plain as day--it means that Chairman Grassley could access the prescreened documents from the Bush legal team and decline to wait for documents being processed by the National Archives, meaning the Senate and the public will only see what the partisan lawyers want us to see. Some courtesy.

This is not a fishing expedition. This is not an attempt to run out the clock. We are talking about a lifetime appointment to the highest Court in the land. The person who fills this vacancy on the Court will have the power to affect the lives of every single American, now and for decades. Democrats simply want his records to be made available to the Senate and to the public to judge for themselves whether President Trump's nominee is the right choice for our country. The American people deserve that right. But not only are Republicans blocking access to Kavanaugh's record when he was a senior member of the Bush administration, the documents they are requesting are being prescreened by lawyers on their side. It leads you to wonder over and over again, what are the Republicans trying to hide in Kavanaugh's record? To go to such lengths to tie themselves in knots and pretzels to deny simple documents that people can read makes people ask: What are they hiding? What are they afraid of? Why can't we have open documents, as we had for Kagan and Sotomayor, President Obama's nominees? To go to such lengths to deny the Senate impartial access to this material is telling. Healthcare

Mr. President, on healthcare, today the Trump administration has finalized a plan for a type of health insurance that will essentially repeal protections on preexisting conditions and allow insurance companies to cover fewer benefits, not more. These so-called short-term plans are the very definition of a bait-and-switch. Under the guise of lower premiums, these plans lure Americans in, but they hardly cover anything.

The insurance company will tell you that this plan will cover you for this and that, and then when you read the fine print, it doesn't, even though you are paying a nice-size premium. So there will be no protections in these plans if you develop a preexisting condition. God forbid you find out your son or daughter has cancer. You need help. You are desperate for help. You want a healthy child above anything else. The insurance company can just kick you off. That is not what America should be.

These plans the administration is supporting--allowing, pushing-- don't have any protections for preexisting conditions. Many don't cover basic services like maternity care and prescription drugs. How do you like that? You sign up for a plan--no prescription drugs. When you get sick, you discover you are on the hook for much more than you expected, maybe much more than you can afford.

There are stories of people having medical bills close to $1 million after an insurer used a loophole in their junk plan to deny them coverage. We already know that many of the leading issuers of these junk plans spend less than half of the premiums they receive on healthcare. They pocket the money for profit and for salary, and the poor person who is covered hardly gets anything. There ought to be protections for that.

We don't live in the 1890s; we live in a modern-day America where we believe in the private capitalist system. But we have protections. We have learned through the centuries that people need them. But this administration, aided by some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle--not all--just wants to roll back that clock for the benefit of the big, powerful industries, hurting average, middle-class Americans.

The Trump administration plans to increase premiums for middle-class families and for older Americans. So many who have preexisting conditions will have no choice but to remain in comprehensive insurance, and their premiums will go way up. If you are over 50 before you get Medicare, you had better be wary of these too. Even if you don't want to buy the plan, it is going to cost you a lot more--your existing one. Insurers across the country have already cited the prospect of this rule as a major reason for the premium increases that are coming up in 2019, and who knows how much higher the premiums will go now that the rule is final.

Let me be clear. These new short-term plans are nothing short of junk insurance. They are junk insurance, and the President is pushing them, and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle--many of them, not all--are giving these junk plans a Good Housekeeping seal of approval at the obeisance of big, powerful industry interests. These plans will cost Americans more, both those who sign up for these plans and the many who do not. We Democrats will do everything in our power to stop these junk plans.

Instead of pushing new rules that weaken vital protections for people with preexisting conditions and raising the cost of healthcare for families, President Trump and Republicans in Congress should work together in a bipartisan fashion--as some have tried to do, including the Senator from Maine, who is standing behind me--to lower costs and help the most vulnerable Americans.

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I would like to join my friend the majority leader in congratulating Dick Shelby on his 10,000th vote. I knew him before he cast his first vote in the Senate, when we were fellow Democrats in the House of Representatives. That was a long time ago.

But one thing has been consonant throughout his career: his decency, his honor, and, most of all, his desire to get things done for his home State of Alabama and for our country. That has led him to be an outstanding leader of the Appropriations Committee.

As the majority leader mentioned, we are working in a remarkably smooth, bipartisan way. We hope that is a precedent of things to come. We hope we will continue to work together and not let any outside forces mess that up--not to mention any names.

He is just a wonderful guy. He really is. We see each other in the gym in the morning. Let me tell you, Shelby is as fit as ever, huffing and puffing away on the bike. That gives all of us solace because it means he has even more strength to guide us through the appropriations process for many years to come.

I wish to acknowledge his partner in this--they couldn't have done it without working together--Senator Leahy. It is a great team, and we look forward to continued bipartisanship, compromise, and success.

The Senator from Vermont.

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