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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, thank you to the ranking member of the Budget Committee for his leadership.
We are doing something a little unusual. First of all, every Democrat is united on the vote that will occur 26 or 27 hours from now. Second of all, almost every U.S. Senator on the Democratic side is going to come to the floor to articulate why we are united and why we think this moment is so important.
If confirmed, the Director of OMB, Russ Vought, may well be the most important man that no one has ever heard of. Under normal circumstances, the OMB Directors are powerful but kind of anonymous because they are responsible for technical things, nerdy things-- developing and implementing the entire Federal budget, and they advance the priorities of the President, whomever--Democrat or Republican.
But Russ Vought wants to go way beyond that. He wants to take an Agency that people outside of Washington haven't even heard of and turn it into the nerve center and power center of the Federal Government. He wants to consolidate power at OMB in such a stark and sometimes illegal way that he alone will get to decide who deserves the government's help and who doesn't.
You do not have to take my word for it. I am a Democrat. I always want to make the case for our side. But I want you to understand these are his words, because he is one of the authors of Project 2025.
Let me just say what he says about this job:
The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President's mind as it pertains to the policy agenda while always being ready with actual opinions to effect that agenda within . . . legal authorities and resources. This role cannot be performed adequately if the Director acts instead as the ambassador of the institutional interests. . . . Once its reputation as the keeper of the ``commander's intent'' is established--
This is like--everybody has watched ``Game of Thrones.'' He wants to be the king's hand. He wants to be able to say: I represent the President in any and all things: foreign policy, domestic policy, tax policy, spending policy, all of it. That is actually not what an OMB Director is supposed to do.
He then talks about a practice called apportionment to essentially get around the bills that we passed, the appropriations bills.
He wrote:
No Director should be chosen who is unwilling to restore apportionment decision-making to the PAD's--
Program associate directors, who are political appointees, not career officials.
--personal review, who is not aggressive in wielding the tool on behalf of the President's agenda, or who is unable to defend the power against attacks from Congress.
Look, the door swings both ways in Washington, and this attempt to consolidate power and basically make the legislature irrelevant is going to bite us all in the butt. There is going to be a progressive President, and if this is allowed to stand, they are going to reach in and defund stuff you like. That is the creature of a dually enacted law.
I get that this is nerdy. I am not saying anybody should make this their primary point of opposition to the President, but we are on the floor of the U.S. Senate, so let's be a little serious for a moment and say that we swore an oath to uphold the law and Constitution of the United States.
The Constitution is actually--it is ambiguous about a couple of things, but it is not ambiguous about this. We hold the purse strings. We are the article I branch, and our power, besides confirming or rejecting nominees, is substantially that we set the parameters for a spending bill.
I get that there are 53 Members on the other side of the aisle that have a different view of spending than I do, and I get that we just lost, and so we are in for some outcomes that we don't like. I am not complaining about outcomes that I don't like; I am complaining about an unlawful view of the separation of powers.
We saw it last week when they just literally froze all Federal funding--not even with a pretext of like ``Hey, we are just going to review this and make sure everything--you know, no fraud, waste, or abuse.'' They just shut down the Medicaid portal. They shut down Head Start. They froze construction projects.
So I want everybody to understand that what is at stake here is literally the American system of government because these guys view this branch of government--the one that is plural; not just 1 person elected but 535 people elected from their States and their districts to represent all of the people in the United States of America. It is supposed to be messy, and it is supposed to be contentious. And do you know what? It is also sometimes supposed to be slow. It is supposed to be slow. It is supposed to be hard.
We have the best document underlining any country that has ever existed in human history, and what it does is it says: We don't want any branch of government to be too powerful. So this is not some trivial little partisan dispute about particular programs; this is the ability for the executive branch to literally seize power, storm into the offices of an Agency that they hate and shut it down operationally and use a bunch of white-shoe law firm fancy-pants words to develop a pretext for eviscerating the U.S. Constitution, which clearly gives us the authority to establish spending laws, right?
And can we spare ourselves the punditocracies? ``Well, Democrats should be focusing on something else.'' I understand. I understand that some of the stuff that we are going to say to each other on the Senate floor is not necessarily compelling to people outside of this building, but people outside of this building understand on a very basic level that there are three branches of government, and they are supposed to be roughly equal, and stealing power from the legislative branch is inherently bad even if you agree with the outcome, even if you think: Well, I kind of agree with them. I don't like this program.
If you don't like a program, introduce a bill. If you want to defund something, there is an actual process for that.
There is a lot of stuff I don't like in the Federal budget, and I usually propose cuts to those things I don't like. Sometimes I prevail, and sometimes I don't. But I have no illusions that I am a monarch.
It is true that this President of the United States won a free and fair election to be at the helm of the executive branch, but he did not win a free and fair election to be the monarch of the United States or the CEO of the United States.
I think one of the conceptual problems with bringing in all these billionaires is they really are the monarchs of their companies. That is like how the private sector works. You are the CEO and you want something to happen, you tell them: This is what is going to happen. This is not a democracy. I am the boss. Do it.
That is literally not our constitutional system.
So Russ Vought has ideas that I disagree with about the size and the scope of the Federal Government, and that is part of this, right? He really does want to cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut the Affordable Care Act, eliminate programs that I think are essential for people in Hawaii and people across country. But there really is something bigger at stake right now. We, all of us--Democrats, Republicans, Independents, the media, which is so damn casual about what is happening--we have to understand that when you are in the middle of the fight, you are not sure if this is a historic moment. When you read about it in the past, you can identify that historic moment. When you observe it in a faraway place with a hard-to-pronounce name, you can identify what is happening--creeping fascism. When it happens and you are in the middle of it, you are not so sure if it is your moment to display any sense of independence or courage.
If this is going to be stopped, we only have 47 votes. Three people, at some point--I have no illusions that it will be in the next 30 hours, but three people at some point have to say: I like conservative outcomes, I like conservative justices, I like tax cuts, but I don't like unlawfulness, and those are my parameters.
I am an adult. I have been here for 13 years. I have been in the majority, and I have been in the minority. I have been in sort of every iteration of whatever elections bring. That is OK. That is the way this process works.
What is happening right now is an attempt to reorder the whole damn system in a way that is going to make every individual citizen across the country less powerful, because when you elect someone--and I will yield to the Senator from Minnesota in just a moment--when you elect someone and you tell them your spending priorities and they come home and say ``Good news; I got this'' or ``Good news; I cut this'' and then you realize that is only a recommendation, it is the OMB Director whose name you have never heard of--his name is Russ Vought--who gets to decide. That is not our system of government, and that is why we are going to be fighting all night about this issue.
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