A joint resolution to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities that have not been authorized by Congress.

Mr. President, colleagues, I think there is a tendency in this place, but probably in the country, writ large, to compartmentalize each news cycle, to get outraged by every new contest to free speech or to the rule of law or to the power of Congress, but to really never see the full picture. Yesterday's assault on a particular democratic norm is forgotten, and we just wake up the next day to some new outrage.

And I know that when people like me start talking about creeping authoritarianism in America, a lot of my Republican colleagues tune out. They think it is hyperbole or just politics. But I think it is time for all of us--Republicans and Democrats--to really step back and come to terms with the full picture of what is happening right now in America.

I know that there are many Republicans in this Chamber who are not ready to give up on democracy, but there are a group of radicals surrounding the President who have convinced him to operationalize a plan that is designed to try to crush political opposition and dissent in this country.

When democracies die, sometimes it is in a coup; sometimes it is through violence; sometimes it is the occupation of the Parliament building; sometimes it is the cancellation of elections. But normally, that is not how democracies wither and vanish.

In countries that have lost healthy democracy, normally what happens is that, over time, the regime--the party in power--just contracts the space for dissent, for speech, for political opposition such that, while elections still happen, the opposition party can never win. The rules get rigged, essentially, so that the party in power never ever loses. That is the plan. That is what President Trump and the radicals around him are trying to do to America.

I know that many of my colleagues aren't on board for this plan, but I worry that many of my colleagues refuse to see it in its totality because they deal with one outrage at a time. They justify one assault at a time without seeing the full scope of it.

We aren't on the verge of an authoritarian takeover; we are in the middle of it. Now, it is not a fait accompli. It is not certain to be successful. But if we aren't clear-eyed about what is happening, then we have no chance to arrest it.

If my Republican colleagues don't force themselves to pull back and see the totality of what is happening to the political opposition--it is hard to see because it is not happening to you. It is happening to your colleagues. You are not in jeopardy of being arrested; my colleagues are. Your allies are not being taken down off the air; ours are.

If we don't all pull back and see this for what it is, we will wake up, and there will be a day where our democracy is gone. And so I want to talk to my colleagues today about the totality of this plan, and it really happens in five steps.

The first step is to convert the justice system into a political witch hunt operation. Every totalitarian relies on the justice system to punish dissent, but also to immunize illegality for loyalists. That is the deal you get in a totalitarian state: If you speak out against the government, well, then the legal system comes crashing down on you. But if you are loyal to the government, then you can get away with crimes.

We are seeing this at scale right now. The indictment of James Comey for no crime--not a single prosecutor in that office in Virginia would sign the indictment--not a single one--until President Trump sent his personal lawyer to take over that office because only she would sign the indictment.

We see this in the arrests that are being readied for at least one Democratic Senator, for the Soros family, for the attorney general of New York--for behavior that is not criminal; for behavior that apparently, reportedly, has been engaged in by plenty of other people.

But you also see it in the way that it ultimately plays out in a very quiet way. The goal here is not to arrest everybody that opposes Donald Trump. The idea here is to just put enough fear into the ranks of those who might speak truth to power that they stay quiet, and it is undoubtedly happening. There are undoubtedly people in this country who see what is being threatened to Senator Schiff, what has happened to James Comey, and they have just decided to remain quiet. This is a tried and true tactic of a totalitarian state, is that they threaten people with arrests if they speak up, and lots of people just decide not to speak up in the first place.

But what also happens is that if you are loyal to the regime, you get away with crimes. See what happened to the mayor of New York Eric Adams. He allegedly had committed a crime. He had committed significant corruption but was exonerated by President Trump only after the mayor pledged his political loyalty to the President. In fact, one of the President's representatives and the mayor went on television to essentially publicly do the handshake--loyalty from the mayor to the President and exoneration of corruption from the government to the mayor. This is how totalitarian regimes control speech: They punish, through the legal system, dissent. They immunize corruption amongst those who are loyal.

The second part of the plan is to eliminate free press and replace it with state-run media. Now, I don't know that I would go so far to say we have state-run media in the United States yet, but there is an attempt underway to try to use the vast regulatory powers of the administration to censor media. And, again, the administration isn't hiding it. They are going on TV and celebrating the fact that, in the latest instance, they threatened to pull the licenses of TV stations that didn't take off the air one of the President's loudest critics.

But we also see it through the consolidation of media into the hands of allies of the President. One family that has just taken control of a major media group that owns, amongst other properties, CBS is looking to also take

control of CNN and may have an ownership stake and a control stake in TikTok. That family has shown a willingness to censor content, pulling Stephen Colbert off the air and to put in place, essentially, Trump- approved censors for their future news content.

So you get to state-run media not necessarily through the state owning and operating media, but by the state using its regulatory powers--its control of licenses and mergers--to make clear to the billionaire class that they can own media, that they can make a lot of money off of media, but only if it propagates Trump's narrative and suppresses criticism. It is happening right now. We are watching it happen.

The third step in the plan is to militarize law enforcement. The deployment of the military to Chicago and to Portland, to Los Angeles, is illegal. It is illegal. But it is designed to try to, once again, quell dissent and protest. This isn't about public safety. This is about political intimidation.

And you are just naive if you think that folks aren't going to be a little bit less interested in showing up at a protest if they are worried about getting roughed up by law enforcement. You are naive to think that there isn't an impact on speech when the military is patrolling your streets. The signal that is being sent is that, if you speak up in opposition to this President, you are going to be greeted by troop deployments and tear gas and military helicopters.

The fourth step in this plan is seizing control of government spending and taxation, and here is where I fail to understand why there isn't bipartisan agreement, why we don't join hands. Our Founding Fathers saw what the British King did: using taxation and spending in order to compel loyalty to Crown, in order to punish the colonists when they rose up in defense of their rights. And so when they wrote the Constitution, they deliberately put the spending and taxation powers not in the hands of the Executive but in the hands of Congress, where every faction is represented; thus, this body is in a position to broadly protect the rights of all people.

Trump is seizing spending power from us, canceling grants unilaterally--most recently brazenly deciding to refuse to spend money only in the States represented by Democrats. The day after the shutdown began, they announced that they were, first, suspending billions of dollars' worth of projects in just one city, New York City--not coincidentally represented by the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate.

And then, hours after, they released a list of canceled energy projects. They listed the States that they were being canceled in. Every single one of those States was represented by two Democratic Senators.

Everybody knew what was happening. It was an effort to use the spending power, seized by the Executive, to punish--to punish-- representatives of the people who oppose the President politically.

And then the fifth part of the plan is to rig the rules when the rules don't work for you. This is happening in the way that President Trump is going State by State and demanding that congressional lines be redrawn in the middle of a 10-year cycle in which, traditionally, we leave lines as they are. Why? He has, again, been totally honest and transparent about it. He just wants more Republicans elected. Even if the majority of people in a particular State favor Democrats, he wants the lines drawn in a way that would elect more Republicans to Congress. Now, in this case, it has, of course, forced Democratic States to do the same, but it was Donald Trump who started this cycle of changing the rules in order to make sure that his party stays in power and that he stays in power no matter how unpopular he gets.

You see the same thing happening with respect to the control of information. Totalitarian states can't accept truth. They can't accept truth, so they try to destroy truth. Well, that is what Donald Trump is doing by banning reporters from the White House who don't toe the Trump or MAGA line. That is what they are doing in saying to reporters at the Department of Defense that you can't report on military operations unless you are given preapproval. That is what happened to the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When the labor statistics showed that the economy wasn't good, that guy got fired and was replaced by somebody who would issue fake numbers that made the economy look better.

You convert the justice system so that it pursues your political enemies and exonerates your political loyalists for crimes. You eliminate the free press, and you replace it with state-run or state- influenced media. You militarize law enforcement. You seize control of government spending and taxation. You rig the rules of democracy in your favor.

You can't see the indictment of Comey, the cancelation of Kimmel, and the troops in Chicago as different events. They are all part of the same story. They are all part of a plan--a well-thought-out plan--to try to destroy American democracy and create a new set of rules that will allow Trump and his allies to rule forever.

I know this sounds extreme. It is. But, if you connect the dots, if you allow yourself to see the whole story--the totality--of this story, you will see the grave danger that we are in. I know that it is often easiest for all of us, but probably especially for supporters of the President who still support democracy, to just assume the best, instead of assuming the worst, or to just kind of close the door and batten down the hatches until the storm leaves town.

But think about how we will feel if this 250-year democratic experiment disappears on our watch and we didn't do all we could as a body and as a citizenry simply because we didn't want to face the hard reality. The authoritarian takeover isn't coming; it is here. We are in the middle of it, but it is not too late for everybody to see it and for us to stop it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today because the American people deserve affordable healthcare, and they deserve a government that works for them--not a government of threats, not a government of bullies. They deserve a government that comes together in a bipartisan way to find solutions to the problems and challenges they face.

Sadly, right now, we are on day 18 where the Republicans in the House of Representatives have not reported to work--day 18. I went over there this morning, and there are literally more statues of former Republican leaders than there are actual Republican House Members in the entire House. I

walked down the hallways. I went to the door. I went to see if anyone was there. There is no one there. There are just a bunch of statues of former leaders.

We need real leaders right now over in the House that are willing to sit down and negotiate with Members of the Senate and, yes, with the President--not to be rubberstamps of the President but to actually come back and say ``This is what I am hearing from my constituents'' because we know what they are hearing. We have seen the numbers. And some of them have been willing to say it--some of the House Members on the Republican side and some of the Senators.

Three-fourths of the people on the Affordable Care Act plans, according to a study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, three-fourths of them are in States won by President Trump. The vast majority of them are in red congressional districts.

So we know what they are hearing because it is what I have been hearing. Some of the people are already getting notices in some States--like in Senator Warnock and Senator Ossoff's State of Georgia-- and they are seeing a doubling of their premiums or a tripling of their premiums.

I have heard the proposed numbers in the State of Minnesota, and it is not pretty.

A few weeks ago, I went on a 13-county rural tour in my State--I visit all 87 counties every year--and I met with soybean farmers. One of them told me that what he was seeing, between the tariffs drying up his market--60 percent of the soybeans in Minnesota are exported around the world. We are proud of that. We feed the world. Those markets have dried up. They can't sell their soybeans. They can't get a good price for their soybeans. I heard the same thing from our corn growers.

So when you look at what is happening with their markets and then you look at what is happening with their input costs for things like fertilizer because of the Trump tariffs and you look at the increases for them in their daily living expenses--like electricity bills and grocery bills--because of these tariffs and, yes, these healthcare premiums--you look at this, and one soybean farmer told me this is the perfect storm of ugly.

So what should our answer be--to stay away like these Republican House Members have done because they are afraid to have a vote on the release of the Epstein files? That soybean farmer is like: What? Go take care of your business. Your job is to come here and help me.

Families' budgets are being squeezed. The President promised he would bring down prices on day one, but instead, it is day 261, and the opposite is happening, especially with healthcare.

This isn't a December problem or a January problem; this is a ``now'' problem because November 1 is the date. November 1 is the day when these plans that are called different things in different States--in my State, it is called MNsure--when these plans, which over 25 percent of our farmers are on, for one thing, and a whole bunch of small business owners--they are not working at some big corporation. They do not have the option of getting their plans that way. Instead, they rely on these types of plans from the State. Ours existed even before the Affordable Care Act, but it is one of those Affordable Care Act plans.

So November 1 is when that marketplace opens up, and then they have to decide--they can't afford a doubling of the premiums. That is what this fight is about.

A poll published last week found that 78 percent of Americans think we should extend the ACA tax credits, including significant majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.

Why don't my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and my colleagues who aren't here over in the House--Republicans--why don't they see this as an opportunity to do something good, to come to the table and do something good? That is what this is about to me. I thought that is what we were elected to do, but, instead, what do we see?

According to Minnesota's health insurance marketplace, a 30-year-old in Mower County--that is one of our more rural counties kind of near the Iowa border--earning $39,000 per year would see their premium increase from $77 per month this year to $225 a month for the same plan--no extra bells and whistles; the same plan.

A family of three in Roseau County--that is way up north--with an annual income of $106,000--this is a family of three--would see their premium jump from $675 a month to $1,100 a month--an annual increase of more than $5,000.

A 60-year-old married couple in Bemidji earning $85,000 per year-- this is in the middle of our State, a beautiful lakes area. It is the home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. They just dealt with a horrible, horrible storm, and their town showed this incredible resilience.

A 60-year-old married couple in Bemidji earning $85,000 per year will see their premium climb from less than $500 per month to $1,700 per month. That means an additional $15,000 next year for the same coverage. These increases are going to force people to make a decision.

My rural hospitals told me--behind closed doors, some of it--they said: So we have a whole bunch of people that are going to be hurt by these Medicaid cuts that were in the budget bill this summer, and we have a whole bunch of problems because $500 billion in Medicare cuts was automatically triggered by that Big Beautiful Bill, as it is called--or ``Big Beautiful Betrayal'' of a bill.

Five hundred billion in Medicare cuts was triggered why? Because the debt went up so high because of all the tax cuts for the wealthiest. That is just in law. If you put up the debt that much, you are going to get Medicare cuts that aren't going to hit individuals--they will eventually--but they are going to hit these hospitals. I say ``eventually'' because there is not going to be anyplace to go get your healthcare if you are in a rural area and these hospitals and clinics start closing down.

So on top of all that--Medicaid and Medicare--then you layer on these Affordable Care Act issues. What the people--the doctors and nurses-- told me is that because that is how so many of their patients get their healthcare, if they don't get their insurance, which some of them just won't be able to afford unless we do something about it, which is fully within our power to do--like, literally, you can take that money that was going to go to Argentina and screw over our soybean farmers in Minnesota, that $20 billion--I have no idea why that was a good idea-- you can take that money, and that is going to pay for a big chunk of just the first year of these tax credits for regular Americans and not screw over our soybean farmers.

So, anyway, they told me that if you make sure these people still have insurance, that is a huge deal to these rural hospitals. It means that they can maybe just barely eke by and make it. Otherwise, people are going to get rid of their insurance, and they are going to show up at the emergency rooms because they are not going to be getting not just primary care but elective surgeries and regular things they should be getting because they don't have the insurance, and they are going to show up at the emergency rooms, and then the hospitals are going to be paying for that care. That is what we are dealing with here.

These increases are going to force people across the country to make these impossible decisions.

A constituent of mine was caught off guard by a $2,000 premium increase.

A family of four is considering downgrading their insurance plan.

A father expects that his family will owe $16,000 more next year.

One woman currently saves more than $450 per month because of the ACA tax credit. She is retired. She is single, so she does not have any additional income coming in. That gives her $5,400 extra per year, and that is before you factor in--this is important for people to know because everyone is having trouble with what is going on in the insurance market right now--that is before you factor in what is expected to be a 21-percent increase in the premium.

Another constituent shared that her biggest fear is affording healthcare for her family. She said: Please keep up the fight for the ACA subsidies. Every day, the cost of just living goes up. I am worried for my family.

We know our healthcare system is far from perfect. There are many steps we should take to improve it. I could

spend the whole day giving some ideas that would be constructive.

One of the things that I finally got passed into law that I spent years working on and leading the bill--a negotiation of prices under Medicare.

Congress, before I got here, somehow locked itself into what the prices should be under Medicare, and you could see people and our worthy veterans under the VA getting much better deals on their drugs than all of the seniors in America. Why? Because the VA was negotiating prices, and Medicare was banned from negotiating.

So we opened that up on at least 10 drugs in the first year, drugs like Xarelto and Eliquis and Januvia and Jardiance--big, big drugs with big populations of people that use them--and we got that negotiation started during the last administration and were able to get some remarkable savings.

But there should be many more savings. These are supposed to be negotiated--15 more drugs and then 15 more drugs and then 15 more drugs--and I will tell you right now, I am watching to make sure that happens. But there could be a lot more we could do on the front of pharmaceuticals and many other areas of healthcare. But, instead, the least we can do right now is make sure that people aren't going to end up bankrupt--small-farm bankruptcy is at a 5-year high right now--who live in rural areas.

We are asking our colleagues to come to the table. We are asking the Republicans in the House of Representatives to return to work so that they are not outnumbered by a bunch of statues that have been sitting there for a hundred years in the Rotunda. We would like the real Representatives to come back and join us in negotiating to end the shutdown, which is what we want, but also to do something to help Americans with their healthcare.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this really is a turning point for our country and a turning point in our fight to make healthcare more accessible for all Americans.

For the first time in 6 years, the government is shut down. Certainly, nobody wanted to get to this point, including me. But we are here for one reason: because MAGA Republicans shut down the government because they refuse to address the healthcare crisis they have created.

Earlier this summer, the Trump administration passed their--what we call--``Big Bad Betrayal Act,'' as we call it. At a time when Americans are begging for financial relief, they were stripped of their healthcare and are faced with the loss of healthcare for 15 million people. That is right. MAGA Republicans have gutted more than a trillion dollars over the next 10 years from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, healthcare that literally millions of Americans rely on.

And we are not just talking years in the future. It starts this month.

At the end of this year, the Affordable Care Act's tax credits will expire, unless Republicans act now to extend them. If they don't--and they are clearly divided on this issue--premiums across the country, on average, are going to double starting next year.

As a little perspective, that means many Coloradans will pay over a thousand dollars more for healthcare in 2026 than they did in 2025.

Now, insurance companies are just starting to notify Americans about these massive cost increases. You talk about a kick in the gut.

When I was Governor, we expanded healthcare to 400,000 Coloradans with help from the ACA tax credits. We got to 96 percent coverage for Coloradans to have healthcare. MAGA Republicans want to undo that progress, and we shouldn't let that happen.

It doesn't end there. The budget bill is a centerpiece of a much broader campaign to strip healthcare coverage away from millions and millions of Americans. The moment the President took office, MAGA Republicans essentially handed him and Secretary Kennedy a free pass to attempt to dismantle our public healthcare system and to destroy much of the science-backed public health policy.

Now, what exactly did they do? Well, the President and R.F.K., Jr., fired every single member of the CDC's independent panel on vaccines and replaced them with vaccine skeptics, people who really didn't believe too much in the value of vaccines. Then, when the President's own CDC Director voiced her opposition, they fired her too.

Now, that puppet panel completely changed the COVID vaccine recommendations for Americans. Now, folks across the country are struggling to figure out whether they can get a vaccine at the pharmacy and what it is going to cost.

The President's first administration oversaw Operation Warp Speed, which developed the first COVID vaccines in what was almost a miraculously rapid timeframe. But now he is actively undermining that same science. It is astounding.

Reproductive healthcare? They are gutting that too. Again, back when I was Governor of Colorado, we made free and low-cost birth control accessible to every Coloradan. We reduced unwanted pregnancies by almost 60 percent. Now, this administration is doing everything it can to eliminate the last remaining abortion protections. They are threatening access to mifepristone, a medication that has been proven safe and effective for nearly 30 years.

On top of that, they have completely given up on things like fighting cancer, slashing hundreds of millions of dollars in cancer-related research grants. That is right. You heard me clearly--cancer. Now, we can't even agree that cancer is worth beating.

If that wasn't enough, the White House actually reached out and publicized--the President talked to pregnant women and told pregnant women not to trust their doctors, but that they can feel assured that taking Tylenol while you are pregnant would cause autism. They did this without any scientific proof. It is hard to believe that they were telling pregnant women that Tylenol was going to cause autism.

It is in many ways one large diabolical fear tactic, and it puts the health of so many Americans at risk. And we can't let it continue, which really brings us to this showdown. We are asking for this administration to negotiate and to take basic action to restore healthcare to Americans.

MAGA Republicans, I think they should be thanking us for giving them an off-ramp to undo the horrendous cuts that are going to ruin people's lives--real lives. It will cost people their lives.

So far, no one seems to be listening, but here is what is at stake if we don't hold our ground.

I, recently, a couple of weeks ago, visited a nursing home in Lakewood, CO. Now, many Americans don't know this, but Medicaid covers the cost of roughly 60 percent of residents in nursing homes across the country. At the facility I visited in Lakewood, over 90 percent of the residents are there because of Medicaid.

I sat in a circle surrounded by residents, some with disabilities, and their caregivers, all trying to understand what these cuts meant for their health, for their lives. One resident told me pointblank that Medicaid saved his life. He said he would still be living on the streets without it because the cost of his epilepsy medication was far too high.

His healthcare, his medication, and the roof over his head are now under threat with these cuts coming to Medicaid. This is a very sobering truth. If you are a single adult in Colorado, you don't even qualify for Medicaid--you will be making too much to qualify for Medicaid--if you earn more than $1,735 a month. That is $10 an hour. If you make more than $10 an hour, you don't qualify for Medicaid. So you have to be working, and you have to make less than $10 an hour. It is pretty easy to verify. And creating the redtape of bureaucracy to get at these mythical cases of abuse--it defies rational thought.

The President's ``Big Ugly Bill'' doesn't just put a $1 trillion hole in healthcare, but it creates mountains of paperwork and endless reams of redtape. It creates challenges that people with disabilities and people making $10 an hour are going to have a really hard time navigating.

And if they fill out a form incorrectly or they don't turn it in on time or they get something wrong, they will get kicked right off of healthcare. It is immoral. It is inhumane.

This is what Medicaid is for, to make sure Americans get the care they need to stay alive, to keep shelter over their heads when they need around-the-clock care. All of it is under threat.

Take one look on social media, and you will see why the White House and MAGA are trying to make this into one big joke. It is a carnival of jokes, but they can't avoid the suffering and the fear that their actions are causing.

Americans elected the President because he promised to fight for the people who slipped through the cracks. But he is turning the very ground they stand on into quicksand.

MAGA Republicans have passed a bill to take healthcare from 15 million Americans--Americans with cancer, sick kids, people living in nursing homes. With the money they saved, they gave trillion-dollar tax breaks, in many cases, to the wealthiest of Americans and to the largest of corporations.

Now, hundreds of rural hospitals and clinics are at risk of closure. Millions of Americans are going to be uninsured. Many of them have preexisting conditions, which will make them getting insurance again nearly impossible. And they are going to be faced with healthcare premiums that will be doubling, and that is for literally millions of Americans.

And we are not talking decades in the future. We are talking about next month, when these premiums go up. By November 1, Coloradans on the marketplace plans that they get from the healthcare exchange, they will be getting the terrifying news--the alert from the insurance companies--that their premiums are about to increase.

What we are being told is some Colorado families are going to see pricetags a thousand dollars a month higher than what their normal payments were.

Democrats are fighting for one thing: to protect the essential care that millions of Americans rely on every single day. It is about making sure that moms and dads, little kids, grandparents, and newborn babies don't fall through the trillion-dollar hole that MAGA has created in our healthcare system.

Let's work together. Let's reopen the government and protect the healthcare for the people of this country. We will be waiting and ready at the negotiating table.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, it has been 1 whole week since Republicans shut down the government. So why did they close the government? Because Republicans decided they would rather shut down the entire government than lower costs and save healthcare for millions of Americans.

Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are knocking 15 million people off their health insurance, driving up the cost of healthcare for everyone else, closing rural hospitals, shutting down community health centers, and much, much more--all so that they can fund giant tax cuts for billionaires. Those are Republican priorities.

Democrats are fighting to prevent insurance premiums from doubling. We are fighting to help American families hang onto their health insurance, because no one should go bankrupt because they got sick and needed to see a doctor.

In the next few days, Americans will begin getting letters in the mail, telling them their insurance premiums are going up--way, way up. For some families, those premiums are doubling. Others will get priced out of their plans completely, leaving them with no coverage at all.

Here is what that means: Thanks to Republicans in Congress, a 60- year-old couple making $85,000 a year will have to pay more than $22,000 every year to keep their coverage--$22,000. For families already hanging on by their fingernails, that could be a matter of keeping healthcare coverage or just giving up, and that could be a matter of life and death.

I know what it is like. Growing up, there was never a time when my family didn't worry about money. My daddy ended up as a janitor. When I was 12, my daddy had a heart attack. He lost his job. The family's station wagon was repossessed, and we were about to lose our home. My mother had never worked outside the home, but that is when she put on her best dress, got herself a minimum wage job of answering phones at Sears, and saved our home and saved our family.

Our healthcare system was already broken with high premiums, insurance denials, and huge copays, and that was before Donald Trump and the Republicans decided to make the healthcare crisis so much worse.

Democrats are fighting to reverse Republicans' giant healthcare cuts and lower costs for Americans. Right now, it is only the Republicans in Congress who stand in the way. Affordable Care Act tax credits help people afford their healthcare, and they are set to expire at the end of the year. And insurance companies are resetting their rates right now--right now.

We are barreling toward a tipping point for American families. If Congress does not act, nearly 22 million Americans will see their health insurance premiums more than double on average. Democrats want to lower those costs right now. Republicans are shutting down the entire government instead of coming to the table to help American families.

An overwhelming majority of Americans wants us to extend these tax credits so that insurance premiums don't go through the roof. Even most Trump supporters agree with us on this. Donald Trump himself just said he wants to make it better. It is only Senate Republicans who are standing in the way. Senate Republicans have refused to even sit down and negotiate over healthcare cuts, even though thousands of their constituents will see their costs go way up.

For example, in Alabama, about 447,000 Americans will see their insurance premiums skyrocket. In Alaska, about 24,000 Americans will see their insurance premiums skyrocket. In Arkansas, it is about 144,000 Americans. In Florida, it is 4.4 million Americans. In Idaho, it is 101,000 Americans. In Indiana, it is 290,000 Americans. In Iowa, it is 118,000 Americans. In Kansas, it is 182,000 Americans. In Kentucky, it is 77,000 Americans. In Louisiana, it is 276,000 Americans. In Maine, it is 54,000 Americans. In Mississippi, it is 320,000 Americans. In Missouri, it is 383,000 Americans. In Montana, it is 67,000 Americans. In North Carolina, it is 888,000 Americans. In North Dakota, it is 38,000 Americans. In Ohio, it is 514,000 Americans. In Oklahoma, it is 290,000 Americans. In Pennsylvania, it is 422,000 Americans. In South Carolina, it is 588,000 Americans. In South Dakota, it is 50,000 Americans. In Tennessee, it is 593,000 Americans. In Texas, it is 3.7 million Americans; nearly 4 million Americans will see their insurance premiums skyrocket. In Utah, it is 395,000 Americans. In West Virginia, it is 63,000 Americans. In Wisconsin, it is 272,000 Americans. In Wyoming, it is 43,000 Americans.

Look, Democrats are fighting to lower costs for every single one of those Americans. Where are their Republican Senators? Those were the insurance premiums, which will cause about 5 million people to lose their coverage because they just can't afford those higher costs.

But Republicans are also cutting healthcare for another 10 million Americans. Those are seniors in nursing homes, mamas with newborn babies, and it is your neighbor who needs a wheelchair or a home health aide to be able to live independently.

Democrats have said, time and time again: If Congress is going to pass a budget for the U.S. Government, then saving healthcare for those millions of Americans has to be part of the deal. We will not stop fighting for Americans' access to their doctors and to their hospitals.

What has been the response of Donald Trump? He doesn't want to talk about healthcare. Nope. Instead, his plan is to inflict maximum pain on Americans during this Republican shutdown.

His right-hand man, Russ Vought, is shutting down important infrastructure projects as political punishment. They are threatening to fire many more Federal workers. And get this: The White House is furloughing hundreds of staffers because of the Republican shutdown, but they are keeping every single DOGE staffer on.

In total, the Trump administration is furloughing over half a million workers who work every day to keep our country running. But at least Elon Musk's pals at DOGE are safe, and that tells you everything you need to know about the Republican plans.

Look, this may feel like a surprise to millions of Americans, but the Republican attack on Americans' healthcare has been long in the making. It is exactly the shutdown playbook Donald Trump and his lackeys laid out in their Project 2025. Since day one, Trump has tried again and again and again to shut down the parts of government he just doesn't like. He has tried to illegally wipe away millions of dollars for programs that Congress had already agreed to fund. He has illegally fired tens of thousands of Federal workers. He has illegally sent our troops to invade American cities.

The response of Republicans in the Senate has been to bow down and let Donald Trump do all of that and more.

Now, during a government shutdown, the President of the United States is saying: ``A lot of good can come'' from a shutdown, and ``we can get rid of a lot of things we didn't want.''

While all of that is going on, why would Democrats sign off on a Republican budget without ironclad guarantees to make sure that Trump won't just turn around and go back on the deal and not lower costs for families? The answer is, we won't. While Senate Republicans keep taking orders from their wannabe King and drag out their government shutdown, Senate Democrats will not stop fighting to save healthcare and to lower costs for families. We want rollbacks of the Republican cuts that will take away healthcare coverage from 15 million people and drive up insurance premiums for everyone else.

This is not a partisan issue. This is not a partisan fight. Democrats are in this fight for all Americans, and we urge Senate Republicans to join us to protect healthcare coverage for millions of Americans and end this painful government shutdown.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the story of America is the story of a people that looked upon the West and saw promise. Where others saw wilderness, Americans saw a future. They dammed rivers that had flowed ungoverned since creation, mined mountains that had defied the reach of man, and turned harsh plains into fields that would feed a continent. From that audacity came a republic that could feed itself, power itself, and then, when tested, defend itself.

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act--known commonly as FLPMA-- enshrined this principle of multiple use and sustained yield for Federal lands. It codified the promise that the land belongs to the people and ought therefore to serve them. Its promise was plural: energy, grazing, recreation, timber conservation--each coexisting with the others in balanced and productive harmony. The law does not permit Federal officials to choose one purpose to the exclusion of all the rest. It demands balance, and it demands use in particular.

But the Biden administration's clerics of the green new scam disregarded that agreement struck nearly half a century ago. They preferred a museum to a nation, an America under glass, admired but untouchable. Under their edicts, vast stretches of land--millions upon millions of acres--have been sealed off from the citizens who built their livelihoods upon them. In Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska, communities that have mined, grazed, and worked for generations are now treated as trespassers in their own story. Their supposed crime is self-reliance--hardly something we should be seeking to punish. Their punishment is unemployment.

The Senate now faces three resolutions that would help restore the balance. Each disapproves of a Biden administration decision that violated the multiple-use mandate of FLPMA and locked away public land from productive Americans, contrary to FLPMA's promise.

In Montana, for example, the Miles City Resource Management Plan barred future coal leasing across nearly 2 million acres, erasing access to 338 million tons of clean domestic coal. In North Dakota, more than 4 million acres of Federal coal reserves were closed--nearly 99 percent of the reserves available in that State. In Alaska, the Central Yukon Resource Management Plan imposed new restrictions on 56 million acres of land, including millions of acres newly labeled as ``areas of critical environmental concern''--one of the great trick plays used by the left in order to bring about de facto wilderness or de facto monument designations without actually having to go through the process that the relevant laws would require.

Joe Biden's bureaucrats wrote over the voices of those who actually live near that land and live with the consequences of these bad decisions, and the results were predictable: higher costs, lost jobs, and deeper dependence on nations that, to put it mildly, do not wish us well.

Every shuttered mine, every idled rig is an act of self-imposed amnesia--a willful type of forgetting of what made America both prosperous and free.

Now, luckily, President Trump and Secretary Burgum are correcting that course. They are returning resource management plans to their proper role under the law; that is, to manage the land responsibly and keep it working for the American people, the intended beneficiaries of those lands.

The Congressional Review Act allows us, mercifully, to repeal these unlawful plans and restore the statutory balance Congress intended and Congress, in fact, created with the Congressional Review Act.

When these resolutions of disapproval take effect, after they have been passed and signed into law by President Trump, the Bureau of Land Management will still have the necessary environmental analysis to issue new resource management plans that are consistent with the law and the clear intent of Congress--plans that open access where it was previously closed, respect local voices that were previously ignored, and bring Federal management back within its legal bounds. That is how the process should work. That is how it is supposed to work. Under the law as written, it is how it does work.

It is, at least, how it always should have worked but didn't work under the Biden administration, like so many other things.

Now Republicans are defending the right of a free people here--the right of a free people to power their own future, to determine their own course. Democrats are still genuflecting before the alter of the green new scam, clinging to their faith and their false hope that if only Americans grow poorer, the planet will somehow grow purer.

In that same spirit of self-righteous delusion, this week, Democrats are yet again bringing forth a measure to denounce President Trump for declaring an energy emergency. It is a gesture so

unserious, it would be comical if it weren't so dangerous.

At the very moment when the world is entering an energy race that will decide who commands the engines of artificial intelligence and all that goes along with it, who manufactures the tools of war, and who will feed and defend their people, Democrats have instead chosen to strike a pose. They are congratulating themselves for denying the existence of the fire while standing in the smoke and holding the matches. Theirs is the politics of aesthetic virtue: better to be cold and appear righteous than to be warm and competent.

But the American people fortunately are not fools. They understand that we can no longer afford to pad the pockets of Democratic allies propping up unreliable industries that cannot--no matter how hard Democrats wish it were otherwise--cannot keep the lights on, while punishing the workers and the communities that can and will if only we will allow it without undue interference from the U.S. Government.

These resolutions to overturn the reckless Biden-era land plans are part of that larger defense. They would restore lawful management of public lands, honor the voices of those who live nearest to them and are therefore most directly affected by them, and keep faith with the law Congress enacted.

Nations that lose their memory soon lose their nerve. The same spirit that split the Rockies and bridged the Golden Gate cannot be reconciled with a bureaucracy that measures virtue by paralysis.

America, in short, was not built by those who made idols of the land but by those who worked it and in so doing, ennobled both themselves and it.

We cannot continue to bow to the Ashtoreth of climate alarmism and bow to the Moloch of ecoterrorism and pretend that is going to work out well for America. Americans know better.

Rewinding these management plans will not desecrate the environment-- far from it--but they will deliver it from an orthodoxy that mistakes idleness for piety, reminding us that liberty, like the land itself, withers when left untouched.

It is therefore with all the energy and enthusiasm that I am capable of communicating that I invite my colleagues to do the right thing--to vote for these resolutions of disapproval and to right the gross wrong that has been inflicted on the American people, particularly Americans in and around the States affected by these ill-designed, ill-conceived resource management plans.