Government Funding
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, well, we are headed into a miserable situation. It is a miserable situation for all of the Federal employees around the globe who are going to be put into shutdown mode. It is a miserable situation for our country, as the rest of the world looks at us as the gang that can't get its act together and pass simple funding bills for the government.
It is an extraordinarily frustrating moment to be here now. There are very few people for whom this is not a miserable prospect, but there are a few of them, and one of them is OMB Director Russell Vought, who is a strange character who has spent his life in the care and feeding of the fossil fuel industry and big polluters and who takes a perverse joy from destroying American government from the inside.
So there will be misery ahead for most normal people, not counting the weird ones who like inflicting pain and doing damage for the benefit of a bunch of creepy, rightwing billionaires who have propped them up their whole lives.
The reason we are here is really two-fold. One, as they have shown during the Trump regime, Republicans really don't want to govern; they want to rule. They don't want to talk to Democrats even where they need our votes.
Here, they need our votes. Yet what have we been offered to get those votes? Nothing--not even discussions. The President only met with the Democratic leaders just yesterday, and he didn't seem to be aware of what was at stake here for the Americans who are about to lose a huge healthcare benefit.
They just go wildly forward. We have seen it over and over again here on the Senate floor. How many times in just the few months that we have been here in this administration have Republicans done the thing that they were furious we even talked about doing to overrule the Parliamentarian and change the rules to make things easier for themselves rather than negotiate with us? My count is four already-- four--and we are only 9 months in.
They don't want to govern. They don't want to talk to us. They want to rule. They want to dictate to us.
At the same time, the other reason we are here is that there is this strange Republican fixation with taking healthcare away from people. I do not understand it. There are lots of Republican constituents who really depend on Medicaid, who really feel great that they are on Medicare, who really have their family budgets made possible by the credits from the Affordable Care Act. It is not like Democrats get the benefit of this; everybody gets the benefit of this. Yet what have we been put through just in these months? A trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. A trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Already, hospitals and nursing homes and doctors' practices are reeling at what those cuts mean for their financial viability.
Medicare--Medicare--half a trillion dollars in cuts hidden in the bill in a tricky way so that the cuts come through sequestration and nobody has to own them. They can do a Pontius Pilate hand-wash of the cuts.
Well, no. We saw what you did. You own it. It is a half-trillion- dollar cut to Medicare. And why you want to do that, I cannot imagine, but that is what you did.
Now we have these cuts to people receiving help paying for their healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. It is going to be about 40,000 Rhode Islanders. These aren't people who have loads of money. Their premiums are going to, on average, double or better. I mentioned a retired mental health counselor yesterday. She is going to have $477 in added expenses every single month because of this. And it all starts now. It all starts happening now.
So when we are told, why are we forcing the issue now? it is because now is when the issue is upon us. When we are told, why don't we negotiate later? my question is: Why aren't we negotiating now? Why would we believe when we are told that you will negotiate later on this when you won't negotiate now on this? Now when you need our votes, you won't negotiate on something. You say you will negotiate later. Why does that make any sense? Why is that even remotely credible?
The harm starts now; the negotiations should start now. Frankly, what Democrats are asking for is something you ought to be doing anyway just to help your own constituents. This shouldn't be hard at all. We should not be here having this conversation. This should have been resolved already--except that the Republican majority wants to rule, not govern, and they have this strange fixation with taking away healthcare even from their own constituents.
Over and over again, we have seen it. We have seen it with the repeated overruling of the Parliamentarian. We have seen it with the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill'' that got rammed through with a simple majority. We have seen it with the change in the rules to allow 100 nominees to go through at a time under advice and consent. We have seen it with clean air standards that help everyone being repealed. Over and over and over again, the Republicans take the path that allows them to rule, not to govern; that allows them to ignore the minority party even when they need our votes, even when what we are asking for is in their constituents' interests, even when what we are asking for is something that their constituents want. Even then, we are up against this blockade.
So I hope Republicans come to their senses. I hope the President realizes what he is doing and that we can put an end to this shutdown as quickly as possible. But let me make this absolutely clear: This is a shutdown that lands entirely at the feet of the Republican Party that controls the Senate, that controls the House, that controls the Presidency, that won't negotiate with Democrats even when it needs our votes, and that has an unhealthy fixation with taking away healthcare from their fellow Americans.
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