Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.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

Mr. President, Donald Trump is sending $20 billion not to America but to Argentina. Donald Trump is sending $20 billion to Argentina to bail out their economy, and he wants to spend $50 billion to clean up the mess that he made by starting a trade war that crushed American soybean producers.

Let's be clear about what happened. It is not that the market is temporarily suspended. That market, in some cases, is gone. And during this period of time with--$20 billion for the country of Argentina and $50 billion for a tariff bailout--Americans are paying more for absolutely everything. Healthcare premiums for tens of millions of people are going to go up by a lot--not 10 percent, not 20 percent, not 50 percent--114 percent; 24 million Americans, 114 percent.

The bailout for Argentina is particularly absurd. Argentina is not a key security or economic partner. It is an economy that is in such dire shape that there is no guarantee that we will ever get our money back. It is a terrible investment any way you look at it under any circumstances but certainly in the context of Americans seeing their healthcare premiums increase by 114 percent right now.

You then have a separate bailout for American soybean producers totaling close to $50 billion. And why? Because of the tariffs; because in one fell swoop, they wiped out half of the export market for American soybeans in China, and there is no way you can plug that gap. You can't come up with--I don't know what it would be--112 individual deals to kind of add up to the market-buying power of the PRC.

When you lose a buyer that also happens to be the biggest country in the world, you don't have a lot of options. At best, it is going to take you months or years to cut dozens of smaller deals, and it is not going to add up.

Just to recap, Trump is at the exact same time incinerating $70 billion of taxpayer money. But what is the one thing that there is not enough money for? You. There is not enough money for you. There is enough money for a $50 billion tariff bailout; there is enough money for Argentina; but there is not enough money for you.

They don't have enough money to help a family of four that is going to have to pay $300 more per month to keep their healthcare plan. They have the money to cover for Trump's economic incompetence, but, apparently, they don't have the money to prevent a small business owner or a taxi driver or an early retiree from losing their healthcare.

This is not complicated at all. Donald Trump's economy is already hard as it is because of his choices to create shortages of electricity, of lumber, of food, of healthcare. Electricity prices are going up at twice the rate of inflation. Vegetables are up nearly 40 percent. Grocery prices are at their highest in 3 years now. People are supposed to find hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to spare every single month or give up their healthcare coverage and hope they don't get sick.

We could end this shutdown right now if Republicans sat down and

worked with us to protect people's healthcare. By the way, the people who are being particularly hurt by these healthcare premium increases live in Republican States. Now, that shouldn't matter, but we are in politics. Just understand, we are standing here fighting for your constituents. If we were a little more cynical, we would let you stew in the most unpopular major legislation that has been passed in generations. But we want to solve this problem, not just for the 24 million people on the so-called exchange but for everybody who is about to see their premiums spike. Let's sit down and fix this.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, preventing people from losing their

healthcare should not be a partisan issue because outside of the four corners of this Capitol, it should not matter if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent--we should all not want people to have spikes in their health insurance costs.

In a matter of days, tens of millions of people all across the country are going to get letters in the mail, saying: Your monthly premium, starting January 1, is going to be more than double what you pay now--more than double.

That is not my speculating. That is not my allegation. That is not a political talking point that was cooked up in some Democratic lab. That is what the Kaiser Family Foundation analysis shows, that premiums will increase on average by 114 percent per person--not 14 percent; 114 percent.

That is just the average. Some people's rates will be changed based on their income level. Say you make $35,000 a year. You are now going to be paying almost $1,600 more per year for coverage. And if you are a family of four making 75 grand, you are going to be paying more than 3,000 extra dollars.

I just encourage everybody who is watching--all of my colleagues, all of the staff, all of the members of the media--to talk to anyone in your hometown. Most people just don't have that kind of money lying around. If you are a family living paycheck to paycheck, if you are a young couple saving up to buy a home, if you are a small business owner already cutting back on costs because everything is more expensive now, what are you supposed to do?

This is not a crisis the Democrats have cooked up to score political points. The reason for the urgency is that October 1 is the day that people are going to get letters from their insurance carriers telling them that this is happening. Open enrollment begins in exactly a month.

People are scared about how they are going to pay for their healthcare or if they are going to have it at all. There are a lot of people who just can't absorb this extra cost. It is not like you can buy a little less of something. When you are at the grocery store--for instance, vegetables are now 39 percent more expensive. Well, you still have some money in your pocket. You are going to buy fewer vegetables and more of the cheap stuff, which is why, by the way, Hamburger Helper purchases have spiked.

So people are making these adjustments to the fact that everything has gotten more expensive, but with health insurance, you can't turn the dial like that. You can't buy a little less health insurance. You either can absorb the cost or you cannot, and if you cannot, you will go without health insurance.

Here is the thing that people need to understand: This directly impacts about 24 million people, OK? That is enough for us to, like, pay enough attention and try to come up with a bipartisan solution. But the truth is that we already know what happens when people lose their health insurance, right? They end up getting sicker and sicker, and at some point, they present themselves to emergency rooms.

Everybody understands--kind of intuitively, but there is plenty of data to back this up--that when you present yourself at an emergency room when you are already supersick, you require a bunch of very expensive interventions, and that cost is distributed among the rest of us who still have insurance.

So it is not just the 24 million Americans who are going to pay more for health insurance and some number of millions of those Americans who are just not going to have insurance at all, it is also a mathematical certainty that the increased stupidity of the system, the increased extent to which the system now makes even less sense than it does already--we are all going to eat the cost, whether you are on the so- called exchange or not.

Look, Republicans are in charge of Washington. We lost the election. Elections--consequences. I get it. When we had the trifecta, we did a bunch of things to reduce the price of prescription medicine, to build infrastructure, to fix the post office, to do the Respect for Marriage Act, to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. We did a bunch of stuff, and Republicans are doing a bunch of stuff, but we are trying to hand our Republican colleagues a lifeline because prices are going to spike everywhere.

I said this yesterday, and I mean this: If we were a little more cynical, we might just say ``This is your problem; why don't you guys just stew in it?'' because this is, frankly, electorally, a very powerful issue. People are going to be really pissed when they get these letters in the mail. They really are. So the supercynical, election-oriented thing for us to do would be simply to say ``Good luck with all that.''

But maybe it is the strength of the Democratic caucus, maybe it is the weakness of the Democratic caucus, but we just care too much about people to let that happen. So we are simply asking, in the context of this shutdown, to jump-start a negotiation about how to prevent a 114- percent increase in the cost of healthcare for 24 million Americans.

Look, the cost of electricity is not just up; it is double the inflation rate. The cost of groceries is spiking. The cost of raw materials to build a house--spiking. The cost of basically anything you want to buy at a Walmart or a Costco or a Target or a Safeway or a Food Lion or wherever you go is spiking. All of that is a consequence of both inflation and tariffs. But this thing is a public policy. This is intentional to spike these rates.

We are saying: Are you guys sure you want to do this?

We are about to find out whether they are sure that they want to impose a doubling of insurance costs on 24 million Americans.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Kansas. And at the risk of getting him into political trouble, I am a huge fan of his, but I want to address the question that he asked, which I think is a legitimate one, which is: What is the hurry on the Affordable Care Act premiums?

There is a really straightforward answer, which is that people are getting letters tomorrow from their insurance carriers. Around 24 million people are going to get letters anytime from now until mid- November, and they are going to pay. Now, 24 million Americans are going to be told that because of the last tax bill that was just enacted by Trump and the Republicans, people are going to be paying an average of 114 percent more per person per month.

It is not like we just went into a lab and cooked up an issue to try to hijack some unrelated moving legislative vehicle. The reason for this is that 24 million Americans are specifically on the ACA exchange, and they are absolutely going to get hosed. And because we are all in the same risk pool, it is not just people on the ACA exchange that are going to see massive increases in their healthcare premiums; almost every American is about to see a spike in their healthcare premiums, just like they have seen electricity rates going up at double the rate of inflation, just like they have seen the price of vegetables go up by 39 percent, just like they have seen shortages of lumber and labor.

We have an opportunity to do something because our Republican colleagues--at least some of them--understand the magnitude of this problem for their constituents. So the normal thing to do in a functioning legislative body, where the President of the United States does not believe that he is an elected Monarch, is to try to negotiate some accommodation. After all, these are all of our constituents. It is not like they are exclusively in urban areas or something. They are not exclusively Democrats. In fact, there are slightly more Republicans than Democrats on the ACA exchange.

So if this were a normal functioning time in American-style democracy, the President of the United States would convene what they call the four corners--majority and minority leaders of the Senate; Speaker and minority leader of the House--and we would try to figure out whether there was an accommodation to be made to save our collective constituents from all this pain.

When Democrats had the trifecta--when Democrats had the House and the Senate and the Presidency--we didn't have any shutdowns. It wasn't because there is more good will on the Republican side toward continuing resolutions than there is on the Democratic side toward continuing resolutions. The reason is because Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi sat down with Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy--or whomever it was--and the President, and they figured out a deal. Even to raise the debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy said: Not for free.

So this idea that the minority party, only this minority party, only in this time in the U.S. Senate history--we are to shut up and do whatever we are told. What is worse is they are asking the majority party to do the same thing.

This President believes that he is a Monarch. This President finds the legislative branch to be a nuisance. And you know what? The legislative branch is a nuisance. That is the architecture of the Constitution of the United States. We are supposed to be in a struggle with each other. We are supposed to argue and fight. And then we are supposed to come to an accommodation.

But we can't come to an accommodation until there is a meeting. So we are going to be here fighting for healthcare, and we are also going to be here fighting to reopen the government. If the clock strikes midnight and we are not able to avert this shutdown, then we are going to be here, ready to deal.

We understand we are not going to get everything we want. We understand we are in the minority. We understand we are out of power. But understand this: We are not powerless. We still represent, pessimistically, 47 percent of the--certainly, 47 percent of the Senate seats. But something like half the country wants us to represent their point of view. And the point of view that we are representing, by the way, is shared by most of the constituents who are represented by Republicans too.

And so there is still a pathway, but it has to be pursued. So the onus is on the President of the United States and the majority leader and the Speaker to find that pathway.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, Donald Trump is powerful, but he is not all-powerful. It is true that he is trying to consolidate power in illegal and dangerous ways, but it is also true that he is often failing to do that because of public opinion, because of markets, because of institutions, and because of the law itself.

I want to give a couple of recent examples. Two weeks ago, shortly after Trump and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr threatened to punish ABC if it didn't suspend Jimmy Kimmel's show, the network announced that it was taking the show off the air indefinitely. So at first, the public coercion seemed to work. Brendan Carr had said, point blank:

We can do this the easy way or [we can do this] the hard

way.

And the network caved. But a swift and searing backlash quickly followed. Consumers revolted. People began canceling their subscriptions.

Disney's market cap fell by close to $6.5 billion in a matter of days. Artists, advertisers, and employees spoke out. Even Republicans in the Senate denounced the move.

My Senate colleague Ted Cruz called it ``dangerous as hell":

I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put

itself in the position of saying we're going to decide what

speech we like and what speech we don't, and we're going to

threaten to take you off [the] air if we don't like what

you're saying.

Criticizing your own party's administration is hard. I understand that. But this is not about whether you are left or right or whether you thought Jimmy Kimmel's comment was insensitive or not. It is about the basic question of ``Are we allowed to speak freely in the country without fear that the government is going to come after us?'' because, if not, that is not the America that any of us recognize.

Here is another example. Last week, Trump installed a loyalist with no experience as prosecutor as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and within days, the office indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges without much evidence at all.

And the case is so absurd that they couldn't even get a single career prosecutor to take it on. So, instead, the newly installed interim U.S. attorney had to sign and present the indictment herself in a highly unusual move. One of the charges was rejected by the grand jury almost immediately.

Now, why does that matter? It is, without a doubt, a dark day for the country when the President of the United States uses the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents. But legal experts widely expect this case to fail before it even gets to trial. And that, too, will be a reminder that while this President is powerful, he is not all-powerful. This isn't a free-for-all. He doesn't get to just do whatever he wants.

That brings me to this debate about government funding. Democrats are out of power, but we are not powerless, and our price is not that high. We have been asking Republicans, for over a month, to sit down and negotiate. I have been here 13\1/2\ years. We have never passed an appropriations bill without negotiation.

But Trump literally told his party: ``Don't even bother dealing with them.'' And so it took them until today, on the eve of a shutdown, for a meeting.

And the House is out of town. The House adjourned until after the funding deadline expires. They were going to come back on October 1, which is already 24 hours too late. Now they are thinking October 7.

If you are serious about a deal, if you are serious about keeping the government open, why are you not in the U.S. Capitol?

Russ Vought, in July, the OMB Director, said: You know, the appropriations process should be less bipartisan.

The person in charge of the Federal Government in the executive branch is pretty explicit. He says: The appropriations process should not involve Democrats at all.

The only way to keep the government open is for both parties to negotiate a bipartisan agreement. If the Republicans want to listen to Donald Trump and say, ``Don't even bother dealing with the Democrats,'' then there is a very old adage and an iron law in politics, which is: If you don't ask for the vote, you do not get the vote.

We are ready to work together to keep this government open, and I want everybody to understand what we are fighting for--what we are fighting for. Tens of millions of Americans are getting letters in the mail, and they don't know they are on the Affordable Care Act exchange. What the hell is that anyway? They just sign up for healthcare on a website, right? You don't know if you are on Obamacare or some hybrid thing or employer or this or that. You just get a letter from your insurer, and they say: If you want to reenroll in your healthcare plan, here is how much it will be. It is usually like a small increase, year over year, to cover inflation.

So now they are going to get a letter that literally says: Your subsidies are gone, and your new price is x. The average increase is going to be hundreds of dollars per person per month. Add to that that we are hearing in some States, and maybe as a result of some job owning with the administration, they are waiting to send those letters. They are waiting to send those letters. Why? Because they are hoping we are going to resolve this ACA tax credit thing, and they don't want to eat, politically speaking, the fact that a bunch of people, tens of millions of people--Democrats, Republicans, Independents, nonvoters, but zero noncitizens--zero noncitizens--you are not eligible to be on the exchange if you are a noncitizen--are going to get a letter saying: You know it is going to be $3,000 or $4,000 more per year.

Like, go talk to a regular person. Some of us know regular people who are on that exchange and know: I just can't do it--$300 dollars more per month. And, by the way, if you get that letter in December and your first payment is due on January 1, you are extra screwed.

So I understand that the White House understands how big of a political liability this is because people are really going to get hurt. And now it is a question of sort of people wanting to not behave as though they are giving in.

But let's be adults here. There is a crisis that is about to happen to tens of millions of Americans, and we have an opportunity to fix it, and there is bipartisan desire to fix it. And Leader Thune and Speaker Johnson's view is: Nah, we will deal with that later. And Donald Trump was saying: Why don't we deal with that next year?

By next year, all of the rates are locked in, and people will be paying $300 or $400 or $500 more per person per month.

We can fix this, and we should.

I yield the floor.