One Big Beautiful Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, on reconciliation, we have arrived at a pivotal week in the U.S. Senate, a week where Senate Republicans have to make a choice: either stand up for your constituents, stand up to defend Medicaid, stand up to protect millions of good-paying jobs or stand with Donald Trump and his billionaire friends. That is the fundamental choice Republicans face with their so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

Before the week is out, we expect Republicans will bring their bill to the floor for debate. That means, very soon, the Senate is going to have a long night of vote-arama. When vote-arama begins, Democrats will be ready. We will pick the Republicans' bill apart. We will put Republicans on record. We will force Republicans to explain in multiple ways, again and again and again, why they want to cut taxes for the rich at the expense of working people.

Even now, many Senate Republicans know their own bill is poison. One reason is that their bill will decimate rural hospitals even more than the House bill would, as bad as that was. It will do that by curtailing the provider tax that many States use to fund Medicaid. Now, they know it is terrible so it sounds like Senate Republicans are trying to sweeten this bitter deal by adding a rural hospital fund in the hopes of easing the worries of some Members among their rank.

But make no mistake about it--and the rural hospitals and the American Hospital Association know it--this won't work. Whatever funding Republicans would offer in a rural hospital fund would easily be overwhelmed by cuts the States would still face and by the difficulty rural hospitals would still be in. A rural hospital fund would be like putting a bandaid over an amputation. Again, it is not going to work.

Even before we get to vote-arama, Democrats have already successfully pushed back against some of the nastiest provisions in the Republicans' bill. This work is certainly not done--it will continue to be an ongoing process--but Democrats will continue to use every tool available in the Senate to fight back against the Republicans' bill. Today, I want to mention one important example.

Yesterday, I announced that Senate Democrats successfully challenged a provision Republicans tried to sneak into their bill that would have stripped Federal judges of their ability to enforce their own rulings. Now, we all know Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration in the vast majority of cases that are currently in court. Many of the administration's most harmful Executive orders have been temporarily halted through preliminary injunctions, restraining orders, and other emergency rulings by the courts.

So what did Senate Republicans try to do?

They tried to write a workaround into their reconciliation bill by preventing judges from being able to even issue preliminary injunctions or restraining orders unless plaintiffs pay for the bond upfront. It goes even further than what the House Republicans tried to do. That meant, if someone wanted courts to put a stop to Donald Trump's freezing of Federal funds or to stop DOGE from rummaging through people's private data or any number of abuses--there are so many--they first had to pay up before the courts could even issue a court order. That is not justice, my Republican friends. That is pay-to-play. It is antithetical to our system of checks and balances. Once again, the wealthy are favored. They will be able to afford these bonds, but middle-class people, poor people, many groups will not.

I am pleased--very pleased--that we Democrats have successfully pushed back against this lawless provision. Now, to be sure, not every decision has gone our way. But we will keep fighting until the last possible moment to strip the worst parts of the ``Big Ugly Bill'' that have flown under the radar.

None of this has been easy to do. I want to thank all the ranking members and their staffs involved in this long, technical process. My staff has done a great job--I salute them--so has Senator Merkley's staff. He is our ranking member on the Budget Committee. The hours have been long. The issues they have worked through have been immensely complicated so I thank them for their continued good work.

Let me close by looking forward for a moment. The debate that will take place here on the floor in the coming days will be one of the most consequential the Senate has seen in years.

At stake is the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans. At stake is over 2 million jobs in red States and blue States alike, which could throw our country into a recession--there are so many job cuts--all for tax cuts for the wealthy.

But today, I want to leave my Republican colleagues with this: If they proceed with their ``Big Ugly Bill,'' they will push our Nation's debt to a point of no return. If Senate Republicans try to make Donald Trump's tax cuts permanent, as they are trying to do, they will add tens of trillions to the national debt in the coming decade--not a few trillion, tens of trillions in the coming decades.

Senate Republicans know this. So what do they do? They try to use a budgetary gimmick called current policy baseline to pretend as if these Trump taxes won't cost anything. This has never been done before in this way, but they are sort of desperate.

Look, Republicans can use whatever budgetary gimmicks they want to try to make the math work on paper, but you can't paper over the real- life economic consequences of adding tens of trillions to the debt. They are adding the money to the debt, that is for sure. They just try to do a paper trick so that it doesn't look like it, but it does, and interest rates will go sky-high, no matter what parliamentary gimmick they try to use.

There will be higher borrowing costs for all Americans for cars, for homes, and for credit cards. Americans are going to feel these higher costs because interest rates will go up because they are making the debt so deep. Americans are going to feel this everywhere they look. American household wealth will permanently be hobbled. Our economy will fail to reach its full potential. That is what will happen if Republicans proceed. Again, there aren't enough budgetary gimmicks in the world to change that fact.

And for what? For what? Why are Republicans doing all of this? So billionaires can pay less in taxes while tens of millions lose their healthcare benefits and pay more for everyday expenses.

I urge the Republicans not to move forward. It is abundantly clear the bill is deeply flawed. If they do, Senate Democrats will continue to expose the Republicans' bill for the debt-busting mess that it truly is.

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