Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Devastating Effects Of Senate Republicans’ “Big, Ugly Betrayal”
Washington, D.C. – Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on Republicans’ “Big, Ugly Betrayal”, which would strip health care from millions, decimate the clean energy economy, cater to the radical gun lobby, attack judicial independence, and pave the way for tax cuts for billionaires. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
The more and more people look at Republicans’ so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” the uglier and uglier it actually gets.
Yesterday, the CBO updated their projections on the impact of the House bill on our national debt and on our economy. The results are dismal.
As the New York Times put in a headline: “House Policy Bill Would Add $3.4 Trillion to Debt, Swamping Economic Gains.”
This analysis is new and different because, unlike their last projection, the CBO studied how the Republican bill would interact with the economy.
How many times have we heard from Republicans that we shouldn’t listen to groups like the CBO? Because what they’re doing so much stares in the face of truth. They don't want to hear the truth. Because when people hear the truth, they don't like what the Republicans are doing, so they shoot the messenger.
The CBO doesn’t have an ax to grind, no. And their scores have always been accepted by both parties – until now.
So, the bottom line is Republicans tried to discredit CBO because they don't like hearing the truth. But the truth must be told, and we are telling that truth to the American public day in, day out.
We are telling them that these analyses ignore the economic benefit that supposedly come from their outrageous billionaire tax cuts.
Well, now we know that even after you take into account any impact – any economic impacts – the so-called dynamic scoring created by the Republican bill is still a loser for working and middle class families. Only the wealthy gain.
The Republican bill will send interest rates higher, particularly ten year bonds, and do you know what that means? It means Americans will pay more and more for virtually everything.
When interest rates go up, which the Republican bill will do because it makes the deficit even bigger, it will be more expensive for the working family to buy a home, a car, send kids to college, run a business – everything.
The latest CBO report is a warning to Senate Republicans: doubling down on the House’s reckless spending will doom our kids and grandkids to a lifetime of higher costs. They should scrap the “Big, Beautiful Bill” entirely and start over.
But amazingly, Senate Republicans didn’t moderate the House bill at all.
If anything, they made it worse. It’s hard to believe it could get worse than the House bill for working families, but somehow Senate Republicans, who are not supposed to be as extreme as the House Republicans, made it worse.
After weeks of hearing from one Republican Senator or another saying they’d fix the House bill, that they’d moderate the most extreme elements, what Senate Republicans came up with is just as bad or even worse.
The Senate Republican bill is simply put: bigger cuts, bigger betrayal.
So today, let’s look at five ways – there are many, but let’s look at five ways –the Senate Republican bill is just as bad as, or even worse, than the House version.
First, health care.
The House bill already proposed the biggest Medicaid cuts in U.S. history. Their bill would rip health care from 16 million Americans and make over a trillion dollars in health care cuts.
The Senate bill would add even more roadblocks for working Americans, even parents, preventing them from getting health care. This bill is just “repeal and replace” by another name.
And the Senate bill squeezes hospitals even harder, particularly rural hospitals. It crushes health centers and decimates rural hospitals.
Are my Republican colleagues going to vote for a bill that's going to close a good chunk of their hospitals in rural areas? We have a lot of rural places in New York, and let me tell you: in many of those rural counties, the hospital is the biggest employer and the only provider of health care.
So, why take them away, especially to give tax cuts to billionaires? It makes no sense, and the American people know it makes no sense. It's vicious.
It means fewer resources for hospitals to stay open and pay their staffs.
And one other thing: even if you don't have Medicaid or even ACA, your premiums are likely to go up because of all these changes in health care.
The second of the five worst things in the Senate bill are clean energy jobs.
Senate Republicans spent weeks promising they’d ease the clean energy cuts passed by the House.
But the Senate Republican energy package is a total head fake. It's not real.
The Senate clean energy bill cuts are every bit as destructive as the House proposal.
It phases out tax credits for wind and solar projects within six months.
An estimated 850,000 people in the clean energy industry will lose their jobs.
Add that to the million or more who will lose their jobs in health care, and the hundreds of thousands who will lose jobs in other areas.
Guess what? When you lose two million jobs-plus, you're heading towards a recession.
Is that what our Republican colleagues want to do, all to help their billionaires? Billionaires won't mind if there's a recession. They've got a big cushion.
But what about working families? It’s harder to get a job, harder to keep a job, harder to pay for increased costs. It's amazing what they're doing.
And to boot, these energy cuts are going to surrender U.S. energy independence to China.
Solar is the quickest, cheapest way to put new electrons on the grid. You cut it out, China will dominate, and they will then dominate the world in terms of solar and have the American consumer at their behest.
If you think they're going to charge the Chinese people the same they're going to charge American people, forget it.
Even worse, while the Republicans are gutting clean energy, they are giving new special tax breaks to oil and gas companies.
Oil and gas will be the one industry that doesn't have to pay the alternative minimum tax. Isn’t that incredible?
So, they don't like tax breaks for solar, but tax breaks for the oil companies are great? That's not an all-of-the-above strategy, which so many of my colleagues talk about.
And let's not forget AI has huge energy demands. It is going to push up the cost for Americans.
So, why cut off the fastest growing, cheapest, and quickest to construct source of energy, which is solar? It's all ideological.
It's beyond rational economics, even by the Republicans' love of fossil fuels.
It is simply that these right-wing billionaires from Texas and Oklahoma – who made a fortune in the Permian Basin, the Anadarko Basin, et cetera – hate clean energy because they know it's the future. And Republicans, at the cost to hundreds of millions of Americans, are bowing down in obeisance to them.
Third – and this one is very important because it has not gotten the attention it deserves – the Senate bill somehow manages to cater even more to the radical gun lobby than the House.
For those who may have missed it, in the House bill, Republicans snuck a devious provision that reverses a century of safety rules on silencers.
We know that silencers are used by people who don't want people to know they have a gun – not by police, not by average citizens, but by criminals.
People who do mass shootings, they don't want people to hear their shots. And in one case, it's known that they used a silencer and killed more people.
But Senate Republicans go even beyond that, refusing to be outdone by their House colleagues. They made it even worse in a dramatic way.
They decided to drop regulations and background checks on not only silencers, but shotguns and rifles.
For 100 years, we've had these laws on the books for gun safety. This is stunning, terrifying, and just totally idiotic.
To the extreme Republicans who slipped these gun provisions into their bill: shame on you.
Shame on you for putting the gun lobby over the lives kids.
Shame on you for endangering families and law enforcement.
Shame on you for adding fuel to America’s gun epidemic.
As many of you know, I’m the author of the Brady Law. I got it passed in the House in 1994, as well as the Assault Weapons Ban.
And there was always a tradition: not shotguns, not rifles. That's broken by this extreme and dangerous provision that the Senate has added to the bill.
We’re going to fight this provision and the provisions on silencers with everything we’ve got, including in the Byrd Bath process, where we believe this provision has no right to be in a reconciliation bill.
It's not a revenue raiser. It's policy. It should be knocked out.
Fourth, the Senate bill took House Republicans’ attacks on our courts and dialed them up even more.
Right now, the Trump administration is losing in court about 95% of the time when its actions are challenged as unlawful.
There are so many actions that the Trump administration is doing that is unlawful, and they're losing.
It's not just liberal or Democratic-chosen judges who are knocking these things out. A lot of them are Republican judges, and a good number are Trump-appointed judges. But they're doing their job. They're obeying the law.
They're telling the Trump administration you cannot break the law.
Right now, because Trump is losing 95% of the cases, even from his own appointed judges, he’s defying the courts with more and more frequency.
And Republicans in Congress want to codify the Trump administration’s attacks on the courts.
The House bill – for those who remember – would have prevented courts from enforcing their injunctions if plaintiffs didn’t put up massive security bonds.
The Senate version goes further. Remarkably and disgustingly enough, Senate Republicans want to prevent courts from even issuing injunctions against the federal government in the first place if plaintiffs don’t put up massive security bonds.
In other words, Senate Republicans want to turn our justice system into “pay-to-play.” If you can’t put up the money upfront, then no injunctive relief against the abuses of the federal government, even though those abuses are at a record high.
It is a naked attack on checks and balances. It’s a disturbing escalation against judicial independence.
Finally, debt and taxes – the subject we are voting on this week.
Senate Republicans, through their proposal, want to pass some of the largest cuts for the ultra-rich in American history, and then ruin our children’s financial future by making these tax cuts permanent.
If Republicans make Trump’s tax cuts permanent, our children and grandchildren will be condemned to a lifetime of higher interest rates, higher costs, and diminished potential.
Why are Republicans doing all this?
Well, we know what their north star is: tax cuts for billionaires.
They tie themselves in knots. They do terrible damage to their constituents in so many ways, all so they can give tax breaks to the wealthy.
This is the big difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Democrats believe in lowering taxes for working families and the middle class, parents raising their kids and small business owners trying to grow.
Republicans, meanwhile, believe in helping those at the very, very top. Even at the cost of dooming our children and grandchildren to a lifetime of debt that Republicans only selectively care about.
They believe that helping billionaires and big corporations is somehow going to make everyone else better off. That has never worked.
When you put it all together, the Senate version of Donald Trump’s big ugly bill is even worse than the House. It makes even deeper cuts to health care. It destroys American clean energy. It raises costs on working and middle class families. And it rewards those at the very, very top at the expense of all the rest of us.
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