Debt Ceiling

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, on the issue of avoiding default, yesterday, Speaker McCarthy made it clear how unprepared Republicans in the House are to resolve our Nation's default crisis.

With a default approaching, Speaker McCarthy yesterday capitulated to the MAGA right and rolled out a partisan wish list masquerading as legislation. This MAGA wish list has no chance of moving forward in the Senate, and it doesn't move us any closer than we were yesterday to avoiding default.

To quote one hard-right conservative House Republican:

The leadership just picked up the House Freedom Caucus plan and helped us convert it into the legislative text.

That shows you how hard right this wish list truly is.

Again, let me quote one of the most well-known hard-right conservatives in the House:

The leadership just picked up the House Freedom Caucus plan and helped us convert it into the legislative text.

Wow. That is what Leader McCarthy is doing--maybe not as a surprise after what happened with the many votes he needed to get elected.

Americans who look at this package will overwhelmingly agree: The biggest losers in Speaker McCarthy's agenda are parents, kids, law enforcement, small businesses, and countless others who work hard every single day to make ends meet.

Do you want to talk about reducing debt? Wall Street billionaires are not asked to pay even a nickel under McCarthy's bill. Hurt the parents. Hurt the kids. Hurt law enforcement. Hurt small businesses, but leave the billionaires alone. That is what McCarthy is doing over there in the House.

Let me say that again. The biggest losers in Speaker McCarthy's blueprint are parents, kids, law enforcement, small businesses, and countless others who work hard every single day to make ends meet. Wall Street billionaires are not being asked to pay a nickel. Americans will not accept this transparently unfair and draconian package.

If these MAGA cuts become law, it will decimate everything ranging from food nutrition programs to funding for mental health, opioid addiction, and childcare. Parents who need help buying groceries and baby formulas will see their out-of-pocket costs go up. It is so cruel and heartless that parents who get $6 a person a day to feed their families would see it disappear. Can you imagine? Can you imagine?

If this MAGA wish list becomes law, untold thousands of clean energy and advanced manufacturing jobs could leave our shores and go to China.

This MAGA wish list will also make Americans less safe by slashing funding for the Department of Justice by billions of dollars and eliminating tens of thousands of law enforcement positions nationwide. We hear a lot of talk from the other side about helping the police. This helps defund them, this legislation.

Donald Trump called for Republicans to defund law enforcement, and now Republicans seem to be following through. The wish list will further punish middle-class taxpayers and reward tax cheats by slashing funding necessary to go after ultrarich tax cheats while raising taxes on the middle class by depriving them of many of the new tax credits aimed at the middle class that we passed--we Democrats passed--during the last Congress.

You heard me right. This MAGA wish list punishes middle-class taxpayers while rewarding ultrarich tax cheats.

It is clear what is going on here: Speaker McCarthy cobbled together all sorts of extraneous measures in order to try and pass something, anything, no matter how extreme. But these extraneous measures--and they are truly extreme--have no place in a debate about avoiding default.

If Republicans truly wish to sell their extreme agenda to the American people, they should not do so in the middle of discussions to avoid default. There is a time and place to debate that, not during this debate, because what they are doing is dangerous to the country.

In the meantime, the solution to resolving the debt limit crisis has not changed. If Republicans want to avoid causing a first-ever default, they should do what we did three times under Donald Trump and twice under President Biden: work with Democrats to avoid default without brinksmanship, without blackmail, without hostage-taking, and without extraneous demands that nobody in America would want to accept, hardly anybody at all.

Speaker McCarthy's wish list is an extreme step in the wrong direction. It heads us in the direction of default, and time is running out.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source