Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. VASQUEZ. Madam Chair, I thought Republicans' plans were to make Americans' lives better. I thought we were supposed to lower the cost of goods. I thought we were supposed to make healthcare more affordable for Americans.

Well, let me tell you this: When you strip healthcare away from 290,000 New Mexicans, many of which are in my district, including 132,000 children and 26,000 seniors, can anybody on the other side of the aisle tell me how is that making life better for my constituents and for New Mexicans?

Well, it is not going to.

In fact, this Republican budget is going to raise healthcare premiums by nearly $1,000 a year for 20,000 people in my district. It could force a 60-year-old couple to pay over $16,000 more annually for coverage.

Now, in my district and in my State, we have some of the best service records of veterans in this entire country. In fact, we are home to the Code Talkers. We are home to folks who have served our country with pride and with dignity for so many years that when I look at the cuts that are being made to the VA healthcare system, I am ashamed of what this body is doing. I am ashamed of what my colleagues across the aisle are doing.

When I go home and I talk to a working mother, a person who wakes up at 7 in the morning and works two jobs every day and has to send her kid to school and relies on the food programs just to keep her family healthy, just to have something in the stomach of that 7-year-old who is going to first grade, and to know that their food assistance programs could get taken away, we are doing the exact opposite of what Republicans promised that they would do for this country.

This budget is a statement of where we are at as a country, and this is the wrong statement that we are making.

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