Floor Statements

Mr. President, President Ronald Reagan founded the National Endowment for Democracy, in 1983, as an independent, nonprofit foundation with a bipartisan board, and since then, it has been the main way that the United States has helped to strengthen democratic institutions around the world.

NED exposes Russian propaganda, counters Chinese Communist Party censorship, circumvents the Iranian regime's efforts to silence critics, and highlights corruption and drug trafficking in Venezuela. And it does all of that for a fraction of a penny on the dollar.

Let's be perfectly clear. Letting authoritarians go unchecked directly undermines our interests and our safety, and these attacks against NED, led by a small group of people, have been repeatedly proven to be lies. It is why the House defeated the same amendment resoundingly.

I urge my colleagues to vote no.

Vote on Amendment No. 4241

Mr. President, I want to thank the Senators from Minnesota--the junior and senior Senators from Minnesota--for their incredible leadership in serving as a ballast not just for the people of their State but for the whole country. Tyranny is tyranny, and the people of this country, whatever our other differences, don't want anything to do with it.

You might be a liberal; you might be a conservative. You might be for immigration, or you might be against it. You might think that guns should be more readily accessible, or you might think that guns should be harder to purchase. But when the U.S. Government is killing your fellow citizens in your name, none of that matters, because tyranny is tyranny, no matter the tyrant. Overreach is overreach, regardless of cause. And state violence is state violence, and it is against everything that this country stands for.

There is a reason that a very unusual--an unusually broad--coalition of unlikely partners quickly converged in the wake of the tragedy, and it wasn't some organizing strategy. This was organic, across the country and certainly across the great State of Minnesota. It was liberals. It was conservatives. It was gun owners. It was clergy members. It was business executives. It was libertarians. It was Trump voters.

Why the new unity? Because people from different places and persuasions, faiths and financial situations understand that, at least on the very narrow question of freedom and liberty, our fates and our futures are intertwined. No one is free until everyone is free.

In my Jewish tradition, during the Passover seder, it is customary to recount the story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt. And the reason the story is told anew every year is to remind us that the struggle for freedom is not confined to the past and limited to others but instead has to live inside of all of us. The Haggadah says:

We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord, our God,

brought us out of there with a strong hand and an

outstretched arm.

Not ``they''--not ``they''--but ``we''--the point being that no matter how many generations removed we are from that story, we are still obligated to see ourselves as though we were personally freed from slavery in Egypt.

No one is freed until everyone is freed. Our Founders knew that too. The Constitution deliberately begins with ``We the People.''

The Declaration of Independence promises equality and ``certain unalienable Rights'' that we hold to be ``self-evident.''

Collective responsibility to protect freedom and liberty is central to the American experiment. It always has been, which is why in the summer of 1963, sitting in a dark jail cell in Birmingham, AL, in the throes of the battle for civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We

are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a

single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly

affects all indirectly.

No one is free until everyone is free. That same spirit of solidarity has united people for generations.

In Hawaii, it was the sugar plantation workers, in the 1940s, tired of being overworked and underpaid, who organized across ethnic lines for fair conditions. Up until that point, they had been divided by the plantation owners into separate camps--Chinese camp, Japanese camp, Filipino camp, and so on--and paid different rates for the same work. And so they came together, vowing to treat an injury to one as an injury to all. They went on strike and won, altering the trajectory of workers in Hawaii to this day.

An injury to one is an injury to all. No one is free until everyone is free.

If there is a lesson in this collective outrage and widespread condemnation of ICE's conduct, it is that people don't want state- sponsored violence on their streets in their names.

It is not a question of whether you voted for Trump or Biden.

It is not a question of whether you agree with Joe Biden's immigration policy.

And the idea that the immigration enforcement has to be accompanied by enthusiastic cruelty is so far out of the mainstream of American society. Nobody wants this, save for a handful of people intoxicated by power and deluded by their own fantasies.

Thuggery is not strength. Strength must be used to protect people, to give a voice to the voiceless, and make people feel safe. That is impressive and noble and important precisely because it is harder to practice and harder still to come by.

But that is what makes the response in Minnesota of ordinary Americans--taking it upon themselves to stand up for their neighbors-- so extraordinary.

I want to read a little bit of what Adam Serwer observed in The Atlantic about the mistaken assumptions that fed this administration's brutality. He wrote:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is

actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. In

Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have

been proven false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs

of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have

shown that their community is socially cohesive because of

its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found

and loved one another in a world atomized by social media,

where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with

lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have

preserved everything worthwhile about Western civilization,

while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Look, I get that we are all divided and distracted and exhausted and that it is not going to resolve overnight. But in the wake of the tragedies in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, a bright red line has emerged. We can argue about everything else, but we will not tolerate tyranny.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for his leadership and his clarity, and I want to underscore one of the most basic points that has to be made. And this is how times have changed.

We have changed what we are talking about because energy systems change, prices change, needs change, and the load changes. Right? But hearing the Senator from Kansas, it could have been 1998 or 2008 or 2018. It is the same talking points, and it is literally not true anymore.

There was a time when you could actually credibly say: Look, I understand there is a planetary emergency. But coal is so cheap. People are struggling. We have to balance the planetary emergency with the need for people to be able to cool and heat their homes and keep their lights on and all the rest of it.

All of that is out the window. Why? Because clean is cheap and cheap is clean. Clean energy is now the cheapest kind of electricity that we can get on the grid in any kind of reasonable timeframe.

There was a time where it was coal. That is definitely more expensive now. There was a time where it was gas, but the cost of gas keeps going up and up and up, for a couple of reasons--because we are exporting a lot of our gas but also because the turbines needed to convert natural gas into electrons--there is a huge backlog of them.

So we have an industrial renaissance happening in certain States, and we have all of this AI data center load coming up, and we have your normal American economy stuff happening. There are not enough electrons on the grid.

What happens when there is not enough of something? The people selling that thing raise the price. And that is exactly what is happening.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. Like, they have overnight prices. They have people whose job it is to find how we are going to meet everybody's needs, so when you flick that switch, everything just works. There are technicians in front of probably three or four screens figuring out ``OK. I am going to buy this. This is the overnight price. This is the backup,'' all that.

What has changed over the last couple of years is that solar energy is it. Even if you don't care at all about the climate, you should still love solar energy. Why? Because nobody should be enthused about paying more for electricity.

What Donald Trump has done is very unique in American history, maybe even in world history--I am not too sure. It is normal for a President of the United States to try to alleviate economic pain for the citizens of the United States, and this is certainly the first President that I have experienced in the U.S. Senate but honestly the first President that I have even been aware of who is intentionally raising the price of something that we all need.

It is Secretary Burgum's order, and it is the way Secretary Wright is behaving, and it is the way Lee Zeldin is behaving, and it is the way people in the White House are behaving. They want to create a shortage of electricity. Why? First, they have ideology against solar and wind. Trump has a particular idea about wind and golf courses and birds or whatever. But they viewed, 10 years ago, solar as a kind of ideological project, as like a nice to have, United Nations, utopian view of the world.

Well, listen, solar is the most pragmatic thing we can put on the grid. Solar is really the only thing that is ready quickly. Why? Because nuclear energy has tremendous potential but is at least an 8- to 12-year timeframe, so we are talking about the 2030s. Geothermal also has tremendous potential, but they have not worked out all of the technical issues. And again, that is really a 2030 to 2040 play.

In the short run, we have a shortage. In the short run, we have a shortage, and Donald Trump is making it worse. Now, why would you make it worse? Well, when there are shortages of something, the people selling the thing get to charge more, and they are charging more.

So you, as the consumer--and again, I care deeply about this planetary crisis. It is actually the main reason I am in the U.S. Senate. I care deeply about this. But even if you don't, nobody wants to pay more than necessary on their electricity bills, and this national solar ban is making everybody pay more.

One in four Americans struggles to pay their electricity bills--one in four Americans. So what is Trump doing about it? Well, it is definitely worse than nothing.

The criticism about Biden during the inflation crisis was that he wasn't doing enough about inflation, but this is a different criticism. This is deliberate policy choices to drive up the cost of something that everybody needs.

By the way, that is also true for food and health insurance and electricity. All the stuff you need, he is creating a shortage of. Why? Because when there are shortages, people have to petition the King for mercy, and that is what is going on right now.

If you are close to him, if you can get dinner with him at Mar-a- Lago, you can get relief. There is enough money in the system for lots of people to get wealthy, but there is not enough money for a regular person living in Kaimuki, Honolulu, already paying three or four times the average electricity rate, paying more and more and more because there is a national policy driven by the President of the United States to create a shortage of electrons because he has decided that climate action is against his interests.

I think, if we are going to move forward on permitting reform but if we are going to move forward more generally on the question of affordability, we have to say that shortages are bad for prices. When there is not enough of something, people charge too much, and right now, we need as many electrons on the grid as we can possibly get, which means we need interstate transmission, and we need to not just permit new projects but at a minimum let the projects that have been almost totally built be plugged into the grid.

So this is not a climate speech; this is a ``people can't afford their electricity bills'' speech. And I just hope some of my Republican colleagues understand they have to abandon their old talking points because they don't apply anymore.

Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap.

I yield the floor.

Yes. I would be pleased to yield for a question through the Chair.

Well, our grid is different, obviously, because we have a series of islands, and they are kind of self-contained grids. But our challenge is, to meet the load, we need electrons. And we do the dirtiest and most expensive thing, which is to light low-sulfur fuel oil on fire to create electrons. That is just north of like, you know, wood-burning stoves in terms of its efficiency. It is not a good way to do it economically, and it is not a good way to do it in terms of climate impact.

So the Hawaiian Electric Company has a bunch of clean-energy projects on the grid because we have--the net capacity factors for our wind project on land are comparable to offshore wind. That is how much the wind blows in parts of essentially Maui and Hawaii Island. The southern part of Hawaii Island is incredible. People don't believe the numbers until they go down there and measure them. It is as if it is an offshore wind platform, but it is land-based. So we have ample resources to power our grid.

When I was a kid in the Hawaii Legislature, I still remember the Hawaiian Electric Company would come and testify and say: The maximum penetration of renewables onto the grid is 15 percent. After that, you get power quality problems.

By the way, that was true when that person studied electrical engineering in the seventies. That was actually true. The person wasn't lying. It is just that we have figured out a lot of this. It is not that we don't continue to need dispatchable power or baseload power; it is that grids are getting really, really smart and capable of handling high penetration of intermittent renewable energy. And when you layer them on top of each other, they are no longer functionally intermittent.

So I kind of was like--I am sort of like from the future, right, because 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was cheaper for us to move in the direction of clean energy in Hawaii, but you couldn't say that on the continental United States side. And we moved in that direction as fast as we possibly could and tried to provide some measure of relief for ratepayers.

But now what is going to happen is we are going to have to buy a bunch of electrons in the most expensive fashion. We are the most isolated majorly populated place on the planet, and everybody pays more for everything, and now electricity bills are going to go up because of the OBBA.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, no regime-change wars.

No regime-change wars.

I heard it from leftists. I heard it from rightwing people. I heard it from Bernie Sanders. I heard it from Tulsi Gabbard. I heard it from Donald John Trump: No regime-change wars. And yet here we go again.

Almost 25 years ago, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney cooked up claims of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction to justify going into Iraq. Last month, just 2 weeks before ordering the capture of Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump designated fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. Fentanyl is terrible. It is not a weapon of mass destruction.

It was Donald Rumsfeld all those years ago who falsely claimed there was ``bulletproof evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.'' Marco Rubio has spent the past few months accusing Maduro of leading a cartel that even our own DEA doesn't recognize.

Just like the Bush administration insisted earlier on that oil revenue, not American taxpayers, would cover the cost of reconstruction in Iraq, Trump is hoping people will buy the fantasy his incursion into Venezuela will be cost-free. The parallels to Iraq are alarmingly obvious. In fact, according to Trump himself, here is the only way in which the situations are different:

The difference between Iraq and this is that Bush didn't

keep the oil. We're going to keep the oil.

``We're going to keep the oil.'' He could not be any clearer. The Justice Department can dress this up in charges of narcoterrorism. Secretary Rubio can talk about the promise of a better life of Venezuelans as a secondary effect. But Trump is being very explicit about the main goal. It is the oil.

This is the same guy who for 10 years and over three Presidential runs made not getting into wars a central premise of his campaign. It scrambled the political coalitions. It really did. There were a lot of young veterans who came back from Iraq and Afghanistan and said, ``What the hell is the Democratic Party even for if not to be the party of peace?''

It doesn't mean that we are opposed to the use of force in all situations. But as Barack Obama used to say:

I'm not opposed to all wars. I'm just opposed to dumb wars.

We got away from that. Donald Trump seized that opportunity because he saw those young men and women who came home who were injured with physical and mental injuries and who were trying to reintegrate into society, and said: What was all that for? We have to stop regime-change wars.

That is why he beat Hillary Clinton.

But it turns out Trump is basically George W. Bush but with the corruption ratcheted up. How else do you explain the administration's talking to oil companies before the strikes but not to Congress-- talking to oil companies before the strikes but not to Congress?

The Gang of 8, not all of us--I understand 535 of us can't be briefed on an ongoing, kinetic, risky military operation. I am an adult here. I don't think we have a right to know--all 535 of us--but there is a thing called the Gang of 8. They are supposed to be trusted with the most sensitive national security information, and they were not trusted with the national security information in realtime. But do you know who was trusted with that national security information, we think? Oil executives. This is not an accusation I am making. This is an assertion that the President is making, which is that they were in on it before the kinetic engagement. There is no reasonable explanation for this.

We all know how this is likely to end, and it will not be good for us. We paid a mighty price for our blunder in Iraq in the thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars spent, and untold new problems in the region and elsewhere. In response, as a country, we said no more--no more war--but especially not when our fundamental national interests are not at stake. Yet Donald Trump is now knowingly, enthusiastically dragging us into another conflict again.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, S. 612 is a bipartisan bill that amends the Native American Tourism and Improving Visitor Experience Act, which authorizes grants to Indian Tribes, Tribal organizations and Native Hawaiian organizations to support recreational travel and tourism activities.

This bill just makes it easier and less bureaucratic for both the administration and the recipients of this grant program. I am glad it is passing today as the 15th bill from the Indian Affairs Committee to pass out of the Senate this year.

I am proud of the work we have done on the committee, on a bipartisan basis, with Chair Murkowski and others. There is a lot more work to do to support Native communities across the country in the new year.

Mr. President, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 72, S. 612.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, the President of the United States is very focused. He is focused on building a $300 million ballroom in the White House, while the price of everything has gone up--food, housing, healthcare, electricity, clothes--you name it. Costs are up, jobs are down, and wages are flat.

And the President is doing worse than nothing--and I mean that--worse than nothing because it would be one thing to not be focused enough on the question of prices. It is another thing to actively raise the price of everything through Federal policy. It is not even that easy to find mechanisms to make prices go up, but he is doing that. He is going out of his way to raise prices. That is not a partisan accusation. That is actually what is happening.

And so, today, I want to go over the five ways that Trump is screwing the average consumer with higher costs on purpose.

No. 1, food. Anyone who has been to a grocery store recently knows how expensive certain items have gotten. Coffee is up 20 percent--20 percent. Beef is up 15 percent. Orange juice is up 27 percent. Bacon and bananas are up 5 percent. And why is that? It is because the President thought it would be a good idea to slap tariffs, which are a tax, on everything that comes into the country--everything that comes into the country--and you are paying for it.

No. 2, electricity. According to the Trump administration, electricity prices are rising this year at double the rate of inflation--double the rate of inflation. So what does Donald Trump have to do with that? Well, electricity demand is soaring, and Donald Trump has effectively implemented a ban on solar energy. Any solar project-- not just on Federal land but where the Federal Government even has a tiny little interest in it--is essentially frozen--90 percent of the new projects. And let's be clear. There was a time when coal

and gas and all that other stuff was price competitive with solar. Solar is the cheapest new form of energy. Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap, and that is a change. Solar energy is the way to provide relief to ratepayers, but there is a nationwide solar ban instituted by Donald John Trump.

No. 3, health insurance. Millions of Americans are giving up their health insurance because they literally can't afford it anymore. I know three people in this building who are going to have to give up their health insurance, and as I was doing open enrollment, I was relieved--I was relieved--to find out that my health insurance only went up by 12 percent. That is like good news. If you are 12 percent, you are thrilled. The average is double if you are on the exchange. The average is double. People can't do it. That is an intentional policy choice of the President of the United States.

No. 4, home insurance. And this is a sleeper. If you own a home, you have probably seen your home insurance spike over the last few years. And, frankly, the main driver of that is the increased severity and frequency of natural disasters, driven by the climate crisis. And so insurance companies are realizing that if you live in the range of a wildfire or a flood or a tsunami or a hurricane or any number of natural disasters, that has got to be priced in. And, by the way, if you are lucky enough to be one of the 15 percent of America that doesn't live in a place that has got more climate risk, you are in the same damn risk pool as everybody else. So your rates are going up too.

And what is Donald John Trump doing about the price of home insurance? He is banning solar energy. He is stopping wind projects that are already permitted. He is exacerbating the crisis that is driving up your prices.

And, finally, No. 5, Christmas gifts. It is the most wonderful time of the year, until you look at the pricetag for presents. According to one report, shoppers will be paying more than $100 more to buy the same gifts as last year. Meanwhile, trees, decorations, candy, and booze have gotten more expensive. And small businesses, far from raking in holiday sales, are losing revenue and being forced to lay off workers.

A good friend of mine used to say: People vote for you for their reasons, not yours.

And, you know, people vote against you for their reasons and not yours. And the reason that Democrats lost the election last year is because everything was up. It is because the prices went through the roof on everything. And Donald Trump seemed like a disruptive enough force in the political system to maybe shake things up and maybe put some downward pressure on price.

And the exact opposite has happened. Whatever his other faults, people thought that, at least, he would be good on the economy. But we are now a year in, and that is just plainly untrue. What is true is that Donald Trump is making people poorer, and he is doing it on purpose.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, when Republicans tell you over and over, over a period of generations, that they have no interest in protecting people's healthcare, you should take them seriously.

For decades, since the days of Ronald Reagan, they have argued that Medicare is socialism, that Medicaid creates cycles of dependency, that the Affordable Care Act is making healthcare more expensive when, in fact, it is doing the opposite. So you should not be surprised that, given the opportunity to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits and prevent people's premiums from more than doubling starting next month, Republicans do not have the votes to prevent that.

Look, this is not complicated. If Congress doesn't act this month, millions of Americans will lose their healthcare next year because they simply will not be able to afford to pay hundreds of dollars more every month for the same healthcare, and tens of millions of people will be forced to cut back on groceries or afterschool activities for their kids just so they can keep seeing their doctors.

The only way--the only way--to prevent the suffering that is about to happen is to pass a clean extension of these credits. There is no other plan. There is a lot of conversation--even on the left but also on the right--about how to reform the healthcare system. Nobody seriously thinks that can be accomplished in the month of December.

If we want to have a bipartisan conversation about how to fix the American healthcare system, count me in. This thing is a mess, between managed care and all of the subsidies and all of the sort of rent- seeking and the idea that most--maybe not most of the money but a substantial portion of the money in the American healthcare system goes to people and institutions and processes that don't deliver healthcare. There is utilization management. There is billing. There are pharmaceutical benefits managers. There are all kinds of rent seekers-- people in the American economy, institutions in the American economy, and publicly traded companies in the American economy that take a cut out of your money that should be going to healthcare. That is a very important point.

If there were a bipartisan opportunity to fix that, count me in; count 47 of us in. But let's not kid ourselves: No one is getting that done by next week. So the question in front of us is a little more crisp and a little more uncomfortable than ``Does the American healthcare system work efficiently?'' Of course it doesn't. But these subsidies allow people to stay alive. These subsidies allow people to stay insured. These subsidies allow people to afford their healthcare so they can pay their rent or their mortgage or buy their groceries.

The question in front of us is not some big abstraction about public policy. We are not at some Axios event about what we should do about the American healthcare system. The vote in front of us next week is, do you want people to pay double and triple, or do you not want people to pay double and triple?

So let's stop messing around. Let's stop pretending there is some magical solution that will emerge over the weekend. We have got 47 votes. We have got 47 votes. I take some pride in being able to count. It is a weird business I am in that being able to count is such a unique skill, but I can tell you we have got 47 votes. So what does that mean? We need 13 votes over there. I can't even find 13 people who will verbalize that they would like to avoid this spike in premiums.

We have run out of time, and if Republicans want to solve this, there is a very straightforward path.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, this is exactly what it looks like. The President of the United States is going out of his way to make sure that people don't have enough to eat. And it is hard to believe because it does sound crazy; it does sound partisan. But he really is using hunger as a political weapon.

Let's back up for a second. On September 30, this administration, the Trump administration, released a plan saying that they were going to use a contingency fund to pay SNAP benefits during the shutdown. This is the way it has been done every time there is a shutdown.

There is a pocket of money that is literally there to pay SNAP benefits in case there is an emergency of any kind, including a lapse in appropriations. Then 3 weeks later, they said: Never mind. We are not permitted to pay these benefits during a shutdown.

That was clearly not the case, and they had already issued guidance saying: We are going to use this funding.

They pulled it because they wanted to create leverage.

Then, they went to court to argue against paying these SNAP benefits. Then, two separate judges said: Not only are you permitted to use this contingency fund to pay nutritional assistance benefits to the working poor, children, the elderly, the disabled--not only are you permitted to do that--you are required under the statute to do that.

Now you have two Federal judges saying the law is clear. It is not a question of whether you are permitted to do it or not. It is actually whether you are permitted to not do it. The judges both said you have to do this; it is what the law says.

This week, they announced that they are only going to pay half of the benefits. They are going to pay half of the SNAP benefits that 40 million Americans need. It is kind of even worse than that because SNAP goes through State Agencies, and State Agencies, in a lot of cases--the unemployment system is

like this--they have these antiquated computer systems. So any change in the benefit structure has to be reprogrammed into their computer systems and then loaded up onto the EBT cards.

Some States are going to be able to implement this half benefit within a few days. But there are several States with antiquated computer systems that are saying it could be weeks or even months.

I just want to make this point extremely clear: None of that is necessary. They are clearly feeling some amount of heat and urgency to end the shutdown. Usually, what you do if you are the President of the United States and you feel an urgent need to cut a deal is you try to get the people with whom you would need to make a deal into a room and begin a negotiation. But Trump really doesn't want to do that. He thinks we are evil. His senior adviser has called the Democratic Party a domestic terrorist organization or some such thing. So he is just like--I don't know if he is incapable or, at least so far, unwilling to do the basic blocking and tackling required by being a political leader at any level--county council, mayor, State legislature, Lieutenant Governor, House, Senate, whatever. You have to interact with people that you have disagreements with.

But he doesn't want to do that. His theory of change--Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, some of these folks--is we are just going to squeeze Democrats.

That would be like normal hardball politics, except for this. What they mean by ``squeezing Democrats'' is they mean threatening to shut down or throttle air traffic. What they mean by squeezing Democrats is canceling long-planned, long-approved projects that benefit everybody across the country. What they mean by squeezing Democrats, in this particular instance, is that 40 million people are going to not have enough to eat.

Look, I don't always want to be the partisan warrior. I like interacting with my Republican colleagues. I come from the State of Hawaii, where there is a decisive majority of Democrats. So one of the muscles I had to develop over the last 13 years was sort of how to interact with the other party and make arrangements, cut deals, compartmentalize the problems that I have with some of these folks on other issues and find common ground.

My appeal to my Republican colleagues is very simple: Can we just leave the kids harmless? Can we leave the hungry harmless? We are clearly in a disagreement about how the appropriations process and this Affordable Care Act subsidy question should be wrestled to the ground. My own view is like, let's just be adults and convene; and then wrangle and argue and shout at each other a little bit; and reconvene and then cut the deal. That is how the country is supposed to work. But separate and apart from that, can we please say that using hunger as a weapon is out of bounds in the United States?

There is a long and pretty dark history, an evil history, of politicians--some popularly elected, some not elected--using food as a means of political control. I think that is not a road that we want to go down. I think we want to say that whatever else we are fighting about, if there are Americans who are hungry, then we should hold them harmless.

Just to be clear, there is no shortage of money in the United States of America. The stock market is booming. You have these AI data centers racking up $100 and $200 billion capital expenditure plans. There is enough money sloshing around in the public and the private sectors to pay for food. There really is.

If you are a regular person trying to put food on the table for your family, if you are trying to keep your health insurance premiums from more than doubling, if you are struggling to pay your bills to make ends meet because everything is getting more expensive, there is no money for you. But there is enough money for a golden toilet, and there is enough money for a $173 million new aircraft for the Secretary of Homeland Security. And there is $40 billion for the country of Argentina, to bail them out, which, coincidentally, is about the amount of money that it would cost to extend these Affordable Care Act tax credits.

So it is not a question that the economy is contracting and our debt is out of control and all the rest of it. This body just passed a $1.5 trillion deficit increase in the form of a tax cut, where the benefits go, not exclusively but disproportionately, to wealthy individuals. It is not a question of there not being enough money. The problem is that they have decided that there is not enough money for you.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, a couple of weeks ago, I came to the floor to talk about where the Republicans are, and this is now--effectively, the House of Representatives has adjourned. The national legislature has adjourned.

I want everyone to understand what is going on here. These are work periods. These yellow days are work periods. So August is off; everyone is supposed to be home. But what they did was they left early, so here, all these are crossed out. They didn't show up. And then they didn't show up for any of these days. That is fine. But then they decided to unexpectedly cancel this week and then this week and then this week and then this week. Now we are at the point where, if you are a Member of the House of Representatives, over the last 3 months, for every day that you show up for work, you get 7 days off. The rest of the Federal workforce is either furloughed at home and not getting their paycheck or they are considered an excepted employee, which is essentially a designation you get if the work you do is so essential for safety that you have to work anyway.

So here you have the Members of the House of Representatives getting paid not to show up, and then you have the rest of the Federal workforce having to show up and not get paid.

I have lived through several shutdowns, unfortunately, but none like this. Usually, both parties are in town, for a start. Usually, both parties are in town.

I get the play that Speaker Johnson made at the outset. It is a pretty common play. It is considered a jam-job, which is essentially: Here is this bill. Now we are out of town. It is the only thing you can pass or not pass, so you are now under pressure to either pass it or not pass it.

It is a very common thing to do. They jammed us. They did the same thing in March, and it worked, but it didn't work this time, and then the Speaker of the House, instead of saying ``Gosh, we should probably start a negotiation, try to figure out how to keep the lights on in the U.S. Government, keep people from losing their paychecks,'' he just said ``Well, tough. I am going to adjourn the House of Representatives.''

I want everyone to understand how ahistorical this is. This is already a very light schedule, right? Just objectively speaking, people don't get schedules like this before you do all the cross-offs, right? This is even a light schedule compared to normal House schedules.

This guy is not that interested in legislating.

And I also want to make one other specific point: It is not as though there is nothing else to do.

We haven't passed a national defense authorization. We haven't passed the rest of the appropriations bills. We haven't passed a Water Resources Development Act. We haven't done oversight.

And what happens is, when you stop doing your work, it is just like homework. It piles up. It piles up, and then you run out of time at the end of the year.

And the House of Representatives--these people who spend so much money and time and put their family and their friends and coworkers through a bunch of pain to achieve being a Member of Congress and having this little pin and having ``The Honorable'' in front of your name, and then they just said: Do you know what? I don't think I need to show up at all.

Sometimes, it can be hard for people to understand what politicians in Washington are arguing about. But this is actually pretty simple. Open enrollment starts on Saturday, and about 24 million Americans--it just so happens that most of them are in States that supported Donald Trump--are about to face roughly a doubling of their healthcare costs.

And for some people, it will be like a 30-percent increase, and for some people, it will be a 70-percent increase, and for some people it will be like a threefold increase in their healthcare costs.

And in raw dollars--percentage is a big deal. But the raw dollars are kind of what matters, right, because people don't have an extra $600 or $700 that they can kind of like wring savings out of.

You don't get to go: You know what; I would like a $12,000 raise to cover this.

That is not available to them, not in this economy. And there is not $12,000 less that you can spend somewhere.

And in the middle of this, even though the U.S. Department of Agriculture in their initial shutdown guidance said specifically: We have got $5 billion in contingency funds, and those resources are available to keep people getting their nutritional assistance, their SNAP benefits--and then abruptly, like four or five days ago, they just like changed their guidance. This is something that Trump did in his first term, during a shutdown, to use those contingency funds to prevent Americans from starving--to prevent Americans from starving.

And I guess I just don't understand why anybody thinks this should be a point of leverage. Like, half of the roughly 40 million people who receive SNAP benefits are working poor because we have decided nationally we are not going to raise the minimum wage, and we are not going to support the labor movement enough so that when people work 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week or 100 hours a week, they still can't even afford to put food on their table.

And so we have these SNAP benefits to make up for our policy failure, and 40 million people need it. About 20 million of them actually have jobs, and most of the rest of them are the elderly or the disabled. And I don't know what the hell has come of this country when the President of the United States, who is in charge of this particular question has said: As a point of leverage against Democrats, I am going to cause millions of Americans to not have enough food on their table.

I remain flabbergasted that the national legislature has basically adjourned under Mike Johnson's leadership. He is not even trying anymore because he thinks it increases his leverage.

Costs are about to double for tens of millions of Americans on the healthcare side. Electricity is going up at double the inflation rate. Vegetables are up 39 percent. Coffee is up 30 to 40 percent. And now there won't be enough food.

I implore everyone on every side of the aisle to just sit down and negotiate this. Under Biden and under Leader Schumer, we just didn't have shutdowns. We just didn't. And you could actually make a valid criticism that under Democratic leadership we conceded too much. We conceded too many policies to the minority party. But we did because we understood that in order to enact an appropriations bill, even a continuing resolution, you need four corners.

What does that mean? The Speaker, minority leader in the House, majority leader and minority leader in the Senate.

So let's get the House back in town. Let's turn on these SNAP benefits. Let's fix this ACA problem. And let's turn the Federal Government's lights on.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak for 5 minutes, Senator Heinrich be permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes, and Senator Daines be permitted to speak for 5 minutes prior to the scheduled votes.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be given permission to use a prop.

Mr. President, it is day 8 of the government shutdown, but it is day 19 of the House being on vacation.

How is it possible that the party in charge of the government is sitting at home while the government is shut down?

Well, let's take a look. This is the House schedule. These yellow blocks are workdays. It is already a pretty nice schedule. Most people, if they are fortunate, get either 7 days or 10 days of vacation. Some people get less; some people get more. But nobody gets this amount of time off. We call that a district work period or a home work period. And that is true, we need to be home to interact with our constituents. But that is what August is for.

Here is what happened. They left early on the 25th, specifically, to avoid a vote on the Epstein files. Then they had this week off, this week off, this week off, this week off, this day off; come back, one, two, three, long weekend; one, two, three, four, long weekend; one, two, three, four, long weekend; another break; another break; another break. And now they are taking another break.

Get back to work.

Get back to work.

We are facing a healthcare crisis, and we didn't pull this out of some Democratic strategist's lab. The Presiding Officer knows this in his home State. Prices are about to spike disproportionately among people who voted for Donald Trump, disproportionately in rural communities, disproportionately among farmers. And they are not going to spike a little. This is not like a normally 4-percent increase is now 7 percent.

For 22 million Americans, the price of healthcare is about to go up 114 percent--114 percent. So you can find some people who are only paying like a 40-percent or 50-percent increase. You still can't afford that. Most people can't afford a 40-percent or 50-percent increase in the cost of almost anything, but healthcare is a big chunk of the cost of living.

So here we are as Democrats saying: Help us help you, Republicans. You created this mess that is causing your signature legislative achievement to be a drag on your electoral chances. And if we were a little bit more cynical, we would just let you stew in it.

But we want those 22 million people to have relief. So we are simply saying, we can open the government tomorrow morning if Donald John Trump realizes he is hurting his own people.

Illinois

Mr. President, I want to follow up on what the Democrat whip was talking about in the city of Chicago in the State of Illinois.

We all swore an oath to the Constitution. I am honestly scared. I used to do this sort of schtick on Twitter. I would say the thing Donald Trump said on Twitter is this, and then I would say he is trying to take your healthcare away. My point was that is a distraction from the main issue, which is that he was going to try to take your healthcare away.

That is not true anymore. He is going through with these authoritarian actions. The last time he posted that one of his political enemies should be jailed, it was James Comey, and then James Comey was indicted. This morning, he pled not guilty. His trial is in January.

So, this morning, Donald John Trump, with the assistance of the Texas Governor, who is endlessly servile to him, is mobilizing, over the objection of the Illinois Governor, 200 or 300 troops to go into Chicago to do nobody knows really what other than to terrorize people.

They are belaying off a helicopter into an apartment building in urban Chicago?

Give me a break.

And lest you think this is theater, this morning, Donald Trump is in one of his moods and he says: Governor Pritzker should go to jail. Are we to assume he is kidding this time? Are you sure he is kidding this time? ``Oh, he is just trolling.'' Last time, 3 weeks ago, he clearly wasn't trolling. The Attorney General went through with what he asked.

So I am asking my Republican colleagues who swore an oath to the Constitution and love this country just like I do to say publicly or privately--I don't care--enough is enough.

I yield the floor.