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Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to follow my colleague from Connecticut to talk about the impending business before the Senate, the 2025 budget resolution.
My colleague talked about this discussion and the Republican proposal as a scam. I am going to use a slightly different term, but I bet we all know a ``Trojan horse''--a Trojan horse. We all know the story about the Battle of Troy when the invaders created this beautiful gift of a horse that they then gave to those in the besieged city, but it turned out it wasn't a gift. It was an agent of destruction, and that is what this budget deal is.
If the Republican majorities here and at the House cared about the budget, we would have an appropriations deal. There was an appropriations deal on the table to be taken at the end of the last calendar year, but after the election result, the Republican majority just decided, we don't want to negotiate with Democrats in the Senate. We will kick it into next year, and we will come up with a budget deal that we write.
We would have had an appropriations deal before the end of last year. We would have an appropriations deal by March 14. Instead, what Democrats are hearing is that the Republicans don't want to do the traditional appropriations budget. They want to do a continuing resolution, which would be very harmful.
If my Republican colleagues cared about the budget, they would complain about Elon Musk and Donald Trump unilaterally violating past appropriations deals that we all voted for and that the President signed. If they cared about the budget, that would matter to them because a deal is a deal, especially a deal that we voted on.
Instead, my Republican colleagues are quietly acquiescing to Head Start Programs closing, to community health clinics closing or reducing services, to veterans hospitals and clinics grappling with serious staff shortages.
Why would my colleagues quietly acquiesce to those kinds of violations of appropriations bills you voted for if you cared about the budget? This discussion is a Trojan horse. The advertised purposes of the bill that is pending before the Senate now are twofold: border security and defense.
Let me take defense first as a member of the Armed Services Committee. Do you need to use reconciliation to do defense spending? We not only do hundreds of billions of dollars a year in defense spending in a bipartisan way, but twice in the last calendar year, we did supplemental appropriations to defense, once in April as part of a supplemental security deal and once at the end of calendar year 2024 as part of a continuing resolution.
We spent 850 billion, and we added to it twice with a bipartisan vote. You don't need reconciliation for that. You don't need reconciliation to find spending on border security. I have been here since 2013. We did a border security bill that was bipartisan that spent money in this Chamber. The House Republican majority killed it. In 2018, we did a bipartisan border deal in this body that spent tens of billions of dollars on border security. President Trump urged everyone to vote against it.
My colleague from Connecticut played a key role in a tough bipartisan border security deal just last year. President Trump said vote against it. All of those bills had significant budgetary resources to invest in border security. Donald Trump and House Republicans opposed them.
So if there is a track record of being able to do defense spending in a bipartisan way, border security spending in a bipartisan way, then why are we claiming--why are my Republican colleagues claiming that this reconciliation bill is about those two items? It is not what it is about. My colleagues have done a good job of explaining it.
This is about an effort to dramatically cut spending programs that support everyday Virginians and everyday Americans and then to take those dollars and use them to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations, taking from people who rely upon community health clinics, rely upon Medicaid, rely upon student loans, taking those dollars and then using them to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
My colleague from Connecticut talked in particular about the fixation that Republicans have had in slashing Medicaid. We saw it in 2017. The Republican priority during Donald Trump's first year was to kill the Affordable Care Act, but it went much further than just killing the Affordable Care Act.
Republicans made attack on the core of the Medicaid Program a key element, and that is why they ended up losing on the floor of the Senate in one of the most dramatic votes I have ever participated in. Medicaid is about our neighbors and parents in nursing homes.
Medicaid pays for more than half of the births in this country. The hospitals are reimbursed by Medicaid. Fifty percent of the Medicaid budget goes to children--I am sorry. Fifty percent of Medicaid recipients are children. Only 20 percent of the budget of Medicaid goes to kids, but 50 percent of the recipients.
When you go after Medicaid, you are going after folks with disabilities. You are going after our parents and grandparents in nursing homes. You are going against kids. You are going against low- income mothers delivering children in American hospitals.
The tax cuts for the wealthy are not necessarily part of the proposal that is before us in the Senate right now, but the House GOP has given away the game. The big beautiful bill that is being urged on both House and Senate Republicans by the Vice President and the President contains the tax cuts for the wealthy that my colleague Senator Murphy has described.
We need to have $4\1/2\ trillion in tax cuts, and just as was the case in 2017, they will go to folks at the top. In fact, almost half of the benefits of these tax cuts would go to the top 5 percent of taxpayers. That is the end result of the process of reconciliation that we are starting on today.
So I would just say: Let's be candid about what is going on here. We can't trick people. We can't convince people, oh, this is about border security and national defense. We have got a demonstrable bipartisan track record to be able to advance in those areas.
The people that are out there whom the GOP are trying to trick in this effort, they are the ones in communities that are complaining about Head Start Programs being closed. They are the ones that see health clinics reduced or clinics laid off. They are the ones that are getting punched because they are veterans.
The indiscriminate layoffs that are being pushed by the DOGE brothers and President Trump hit veterans. Thirty percent of the Federal workforce are veterans. It is only about 3 percent of the civilian workforce, but if you do mass and indiscriminate layoffs of Federal employees, whom do you hurt disproportionately? You are hurting people who have served this country and are entitled to respect and gratitude. They don't deserve to be treated, in Donald Trump's words, as losers in the way that they are being treated with these indiscriminate layoffs.
These are the people who are being affected thus far by these policies of the President. So that is what we are fighting about, and that is whom we are fighting for.
We are going to offer amendments during vote-arama to clarify what is going on to try to protect Medicaid and children's nutrition and other safety net programs, and we will battle to try to convince some Republicans to join us in those amendments.
But let's just be clear about what this is: It is a Trojan horse- effort to amass savings off the backs of everyday people to pour into tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who don't need help. We need to resist it in every way we can. I look forward to joining my colleagues in doing so.
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