Floor Statements

Mr. President, I enjoyed hearing my friend and gym colleague talking about defense. I agree with him; we need a strong defense. I agree with him that deficits are an enemy of getting the defense spending that we need. I hope when we consider tax cuts, we will hear that same view that we can't go deeply into deficit. I appreciate my colleague's great comments.

Mr. President, I wish to talk first about some good news: the appropriations process--our negotiations to keep the government open. The President has backed off his threat to hold government funding hostage over the wall and over cutting healthcare funding for millions of Americans. This healthcare funding is essential to ensuring that millions of Americans will not see their premiums skyrocket and that they will not be kicked off their plans. Make no mistake, we will watch the administration like a hawk to make sure they follow through on their promise to continue this funding.

We are very happy that they have seen the light that Democrats have tried to show them for weeks. Threatening to hurt Americans for political gain is a loser.

Much like the administration's withdrawal of their demand for wall funding, which Democrats laid out a month ago as a condition for successful bipartisan negotiations on the appropriations bill, this decision brings us closer to a bipartisan agreement to fund the government and is good news for the American people.

The tendency of this administration has been to go at it alone. What these negotiations show is that when the Trump administration takes into account the Democratic position and is willing to move in our direction, they can make progress on issues as we have on the appropriations bills.

On those appropriations bills, of course, there are a few remaining issues to be settled. The most vexing are poison pill riders. We will not accept them, but I believe we are close to final agreement. Our side will continue to work in good faith to see that an agreement is reached to keep the government open by tomorrow's deadline.

I hope that this is something of a metaphor for the future, that the administration will not put together its plan and say that bipartisanship means you support our plan without any Democratic consultation, input, and, more importantly, taking into account our values, which we believe are close to where American values are--much closer than some on the other side.

Mr. President, yesterday the President released--and this is not as good news, unfortunately--a one-page outline of his plan to change the U.S. Tax Code. Even from the very limited details that were released, the President's priorities are clear: Give massive tax breaks to folks like himself--the very, very wealthy in America.

The top rate would come down; taxes that disproportionately affect the very wealthy would go away, while middle-class and working families would be denied some of the most useful deductions. This isn't simply the Trump plan to lower taxes. It is the plan to lower the taxes of Trump and those with enormous wealth, similar to his.

The prime beneficiaries of the Trump plan would be his Cabinet. Secretary Mnuchin, one of the architects of the plan, could not guarantee this morning that the middle class will not pay more under the Trump tax plan. If, on one sheet of paper, you can guarantee that corporations pay less and you can guarantee that the wealthiest Americans pay less but you can't guarantee that hard-working, middle- class Americans pay less, you don't have a good recipe for changing our Tax Code. And, for the good of America, you are to go back to the drawing board.

This proposal falls short, far short of the mark in several ways: First and foremost, it mostly benefits the very wealthy. In the Trump tax plan, corporations and the very wealthy get a huge tax break through lower rates and the elimination of things like the estate tax. In fact, the proposal the President put out yesterday is actually even more of a giveaway on the estate tax than his proposal in his campaign. In the campaign, President Trump promised to repeal the estate tax for estates up to $10 million, retaining it for the wealthiest of estates. This proposal would eliminate the tax completely, particularly on those multimillion- and even billion-dollar estates. The result would be that the 5,200 wealthiest families in America would each receive, on average, a $3 million windfall, and many would receive much, much more than that.

Also, because the Trump plan lowers the tax rate on the so-called passthrough entities to 15 percent, wealthy businessmen, like President Trump, will be able to use passthrough entities to pay 15 percent in taxes while everyone else pays in the twenties and thirties. This has implications for something we don't need--the carried interest loophole. President Trump promised to get rid of this in his campaign. Instead of using the carried interest loophole under the President's bill, Wall Street funds could file their taxes at a new passthrough rate of 15 percent, which is even lower than the present tax on carried interest.

Ironically, the President's tax plan would indeed get rid of the carried interest loophole only by making it lower than the present rate and making it permanent--a total, total reversal of what he pledged in his campaign.

It all goes to show that those who stand to benefit most from this proposal are folks like the President and those at his level of wealth, while tens of millions of American middle-class, working families are hurt and could very well pay more.

This brings me to my second point, which is that the Trump plan hurts middle-class and working Americans by eliminating their most popular and useful deductions. Take the elimination of the State and local tax deduction, for instance, which is used by so many middle-class families in my home State of New York. As it was cited in the Syracuse Post Standard: ``The loss of the deduction will cost New Yorkers an average of $4,500 per year for those who file itemized returns, totaling about $68 billion per

year that State residents will no longer be allowed to deduct from Federal returns.''

I saw in Newsday this morning that a number of our Long Island Republican colleagues said they couldn't be for this. We hope they will stand up to anything that gets rid of State and local deductibility because, let me repeat, that is $4,500 a year that New Yorkers would no longer be able to deduct on average--massive tax cuts for the very wealthy, crumbs at best for everyone else.

Third, the Republican plan is steeped in hypocrisy. Even without filling in the details, Trump's plan is already impossible to pay for. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump's tax cuts will cost about $5.5 trillion over 10 years, as much as $7 trillion. That is a huge amount of money in our economy.

CRFB projects that ``no plausible amount of economic growth would be able to pay for the tax plan.'' The Republican plan would explode the deficit.

For the last 8 years, all we heard from our Republican colleagues was that Obama was raising the deficit and we needed to cut programs that benefit the poor and the middle class; cut the entitlements, Social Security, Medicare because of the deficit. All of a sudden, now with a Republican President and a proposed tax cut for the wealthy, we are hearing from the other side of the aisle that deficits don't matter.

Our Republican colleagues certainly believe the admonition that ``consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.''

Fourth, the Trump tax plan would explode the deficit and, thus, endanger Social Security and Medicare, which may well be the nefarious, ultimate goal of the hard right.

Sadly, I know it can happen. I have seen it before with the Bush tax cuts. President Bush pushed a big tax break for the wealthy. It blew a hole in the deficit and racked up debt, and then he and his Republican colleagues tried to pursue deep cuts to the social safety net to balance the ledger.

If Trump's tax plan were to pass, you can be sure, America, that a few years down the line--maybe even not that long--the deficit will be so large that our Republican colleagues will throw up their hands and say: We have no choice but to come after Social Security and Medicare and other important programs for the middle class as a way to address the deficit they created by showering tax breaks on the very rich.

They will resume the cry they had in the Obama years: Cut the deficit--which seems to apply to the programs that help the middle class but never to the ones that benefit the wealthy.

Just from the bare-bones skeleton the administration outlined yesterday, we can already surmise that this plan is not much more than a thinly veiled ruse to give away trillions to the wealthiest among us, starve the government of resources, balloon the deficit, and then cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare to make up the difference.

This plan will roundly be rejected by taxpayers of all stripes. The American people are once again learning that what President Trump promised to working America in his campaign and what he is doing are totally at odds.

Mr. President, on TrumpCare, very briefly--on the new version of TrumpCare that may soon be headed for a vote in the House, let's not forget the reason that Americans were against the first version of TrumpCare. They are still in the second version. This version is worse, and there has been a lot of focus on a few of the changes.

The fundamental nastiness of the TrumpCare proposal--raising the rates on people 50 to 65, 24 million people uncovered, difficulty in covering preexisting conditions--is still in this bill. In fact, it is even worse. The new TrumpCare will allow States to decide whether insurers have to cover Americans with preexisting conditions. It is hard to come up with a crueler bill than one that would have resulted in 24 million fewer Americans with healthcare coverage, but this new TrumpCare manages to do it. It would hurt even more Americans and bring us back to the days when an insurance company could deny you coverage exactly when you needed it most.

I say to the more moderate Republicans in the House: If you didn't like the first version, you surely shouldn't like this version. Frankly, you will pay a huge consequence in the 2018 elections if you vote for it. We hope you don't vote for it because we know how many people it would hurt. Even if it passed the House, the chances for survival in the Senate are small. We don't even know if the new version would survive under the rules of reconciliation, the amendment to allow States to drop preexisting conditions. The fulcrum of the new changes very possibly violates the Byrd rule and would be kicked down here and need 60 votes, which they won't get for such a nasty provision.

A warning to all those voting for it in the House: It may well be a chimera, all to save face for the President in his first hundred days.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

Mr. President, colleagues, I am objecting because we still have to resolve the issue of poison pill riders before Democrats can agree to the short-term CR.

Let's make no mistake about it, we are indeed making great progress. I thank the majority leader. He has been cooperative and extremely helpful throughout the process. I thank Chairman Cochran and Senator Leahy the same. But our position has been clear, and it is nothing new: no poison pill riders. The sooner we can resolve this issue, the quicker we can have an agreement on appropriations for 2017.

So I object.

Mr. President, there is a simple way to resolve it, and that is, the Republican leader of the Senate and the Speaker of the House just agree to no poison pill riders.

I yield the floor.

We are aware.

Mr. President, as Senators continue to negotiate the appropriations bills this week, I want to reiterate my hopes that we can reach an agreement by this Friday. So long as we try to operate within the parameters our parties have operated under for the last few spending bills, I am optimistic about the chances for a deal.

I am glad the President has taken the wall off the table in the negotiations. Democrats have always been for border security. In fact, we supported one of the toughest border security packages in comprehensive immigration reform in an amendment offered by two of my Republican colleagues, Senator Hoeven and Senator Corker. We may address border security in this bill as well, but it will not include any funding for a wall, plain and simple.

Now, we still have a few issues to work out, including the issue of cost sharing, Puerto Rico, and getting permanent healthcare for miners, which I was glad to hear the majority leader voice support for yesterday--permanent healthcare for miners. I want to salute Senator Manchin, who has worked so long and hard for these poor miners who have struggled and have had hard, hard, hard lives. They shouldn't have their health benefits taken away. But above all, in the bill we have to make sure there are no poison pill riders. That has been a watchword of our negotiations in the past and is what led to success, and I hope both sides of the aisle will pursue that now.

We Democrats remain committed to fighting President Trump's cutback on women's health, a rollback of financial protections in Wall Street reform, rollbacks of protections for clean air and clean water, and against a deportation force. Those are the kinds of poison pill riders that could hurt an agreement, and I hope we will just decide at the given time that we can debate them in regular order, but they shouldn't hold the government hostage and pass them without debate.

Mr. President, today we will also be hearing some details--we don't know how many--about the President's tax plan. We will take a look at what they are proposing, but I can tell you this: If the President's plan is to give a massive tax break to the very wealthy in this country--a plan that will mostly benefit people and businesses like President Trump's--that will not pass muster with Democrats.

The very wealthy are doing pretty well in America. Their incomes keep going up. Their wealth keeps going up. God bless them. Let them do well. But they don't need another huge tax break while middle-class Americans and those struggling to get there need help just staying afloat. It is already the case that CEOs and other folks at the top of the corporate ladder can use deductions and loopholes to pay less in taxes than their secretaries. We don't need a plan that establishes the same principle in the basic rates by allowing wealthy businessmen, like President Trump, to use passthrough entities to pay 15 percent in taxes while everyone else pays in the twenties and thirties. We don't need a tax plan that allows the very rich to use passthroughs to reduce their rates to 15 percent while average Americans are paying much more. That is not tax reform. That is just a tax giveaway to the very, very wealthy that will explode the deficit.

So we will take a look at what the President proposes later today. If it is just another deficit-busting tax break for the very wealthy, I predict their proposal will land with a dud with the American people.

Mr. President, later today, the Senate will be receiving a briefing by the administration on the situation in North Korea. I look forward to the opportunity to hear from the Secretary of State, who I understand drafted the administration's plan, and other senior administration officials about their views on North Korea and the posture of the United States in that region.

I think what many of my colleagues hope to hear articulated is a coherent, well-thought-out, strategic plan. So far, Congress and the American public have heard very little in the way of strategy with respect to North Korea. We have heard very little about strategy to combat ISIS. We have heard very little about a strategy on how to deal with Putin's Russia. We have heard very little about our strategy in Syria. Only a few weeks ago, the President authorized a strike in Syria. Is there a broader strategy? Does the administration support regime change or not? Do they plan further U.S. involvement?

These are difficult and important questions, and there are many more of them to be asked and answered about this administration's nascent national security policy for hotspots around the globe. I hope that later today, at least in relation to North Korea, we Senators are given a serious, well-considered outline of the administration's strategic goals in the Korean peninsula and their plans to achieve them.

Mr. President, as we approach the 100-day mark of the Trump administration, we Democrats have been highlighting the litany of broken and unfulfilled promises that President Trump made to working families. It is our job as the minority party to hold the President accountable to the promises he made to voters, particularly the ones he made to working families who are struggling out there. Many of these folks voted for the President because they believed him when he promised to bring back their jobs or get tougher on trade or drain the swamp. So it is important to point out where the President has gone back on his word and where he has fallen short in these first 100 days.

On the crucial issues of jobs and the economy, this President has made little progress in 100 days. His party hasn't introduced a major job-creating piece of legislation to date, and he has actually backtracked on his promises to get tough on trade and outsourcing, two things which have cost our country millions of jobs. I was particularly upset to see the President consider repealing President Obama's law that prevented corporate inversions that allowed big corporations to locate overseas to lower their tax rates.

Instead of draining the swamp and making the government more accountable to the people, President Trump has filled his government with billionaires and bankers and folks ladened with conflicts of interest. Amazingly enough, he was going to clean up Washington and make it transparent. The White House has decided to keep the visitor log secret and, even worse, allowed waivers to lobbyists to come to work at the White House on the very same issues they were just lobbying on, and those waivers are kept secret. We will not even know about them.

These reversals aren't the normal adjustments that a President makes when transitioning from a campaign to the reality of government; these are stunning about-faces on core promises the President made to working Americans.

Mr. President, first let me thank my friend from Illinois for his always thoughtful and good words. I agree with his sentiments on Mr. Rosenstein, whom I will support as well.

Mr. President, first I want to say that it is very good news that the President seems to be taking the wall off the table in the negotiations we are having on an appropriations bill this week. It would remove the prospect of a needless fight over a poison pill proposal that Members of both parties don't support. On a bill as important as one to keep the government open, it is a dangerous prospect for the administration to push so hard for such a flawed, incomplete, and unthought-out proposal on a must-pass spending bill. It could tank what would have been productive, bipartisan, bicameral negotiations between the leaders in both Houses. If the threat of the wall is removed, as I hope is the case, our negotiations can continue and we can hopefully continue to resolve all of the outstanding issues by Friday.

Make no mistake about it, there are other important issues to resolve--no poison pill riders, above all, and the ratio of defense and nondefense spending in terms of increases above the baseline. On the nondefense side, miners are very important on our side, getting permanent healthcare for these miners who have struggled their whole lives; the issue of cost-sharing, where 6 million people could lose their healthcare because it would become unaffordable; and the issue of Puerto Rico, which is struggling so, are among those that we feel are important as well. There are other issues to resolve as well, but I am hopeful we can address them as the week moves forward. Poison pill riders are something that could really hurt the bill, and we don't want that to happen.

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

Mr. President, first, I echo the majority leader's remarks on the tragic death of Matthew McClanahan last Tuesday. We all know the Architect of the Capitol employs plumbers, landscapers, painters, electricians, custodians, and mechanics. They make their careers by ensuring that our buildings and grounds are well maintained, safe, and beautiful. The stunning tragedy of last week has shaken this entire staff to its core.

Matthew McClanahan died way too young. That he died at work in repairing the Capitol's sprinkler system has hit our entire community very hard.

To those who worked so hard to save him, you have our gratitude and admiration.

To those who feel his absence so keenly in their daily lives, you have our sympathy and our support.

May you remember the words of Scripture fittingly from Matthew: ``Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.''

Our prayers go out to his family--his wife, Lauren; his 7-year-old daughter, Evie; his young son, Matthew; and to his parents, brothers, and sisters-in-law, and grandparents.

His funeral was yesterday, and I understand it was completely packed, with some mourners outside and unable to get in. He was well loved. He will be well remembered.

Mr. President, I join the majority leader in welcoming everybody back to the Senate after the 2-week recess. We have a lot of business to attend to this week. Most importantly, we have to pass a spending bill to keep the government open.

So far, the discussions between our two sides have been constructive and are progressing nicely. Without interference, I believe our two parties can come together on an agreement by the end of the week. The four-corner negotiations--that is Leader McConnell, Speaker Ryan, Leader Pelosi, and I--have been going very well, and a monkey wrench was thrown into them.

I will caution: If the administration insists on poison pill riders or extraneous funding requests, then our talks could get sidetracked, particularly if the administration demands funding for a border wall.

Democrats have been long clear that the border wall is a nonstarter. More than a month ago, here on the floor, from this desk, I warned against including funding for the border wall in any must-pass government spending bill. If the administration insists on funding for a wall in this bill, it will endanger the prospects of a bill's passing and raise the prospects of a government shutdown because a border wall, we believe, is a pointless waste of taxpayer money for several reasons.

First, President Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the wall, not American taxpayers. The idea that President Trump is fulfilling a campaign promise when he says that America will pay for the wall now and Mexico will pay it back later is untrue. He will only fulfill his campaign promise if he gets Mexico to pay for the wall now. That is No. 1.

Second, the Trump administration has not shown us any specific plans about how and where the wall will be built. How high will it be? How much will it cost? Where along the Rio Grande River will it be built? The President's own Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Zinke, said:

The border is complicated, as far as building a physical

wall . . . the Rio Grande, what side of the river are you

going to put the wall? We're not going to put it on our side

and cede the river to Mexico. And we're probably not going to

put it in the middle of the river.

Zinke said it well: How, where, when, and how many dollars is this wall going to cost? Before rushing into it, we ought to see some real plans, not just talk.

Third, the cost of the wall is staggering. Some estimates peg it as high as $50 billion. That money could be spent a lot better elsewhere on things like infrastructure and education. For example, with $50 billion, we could connect more than 98 percent of Americans to high- speed internet, more than double the Federal funding for roads and bridges across our country, and update every VA building listed in the VA's long-range strategic capital plan. The money would be better spent elsewhere.

Fourth, there are much better ways to protect our borders--with drones, fences, and other more cost-effective measures. The President said the wall is needed to stop the flow of drugs, but drugs come into our country in several ways, including by water, through tunnels, and snuck in by cars and trucks. We have all seen the pictures on TV where they hide them in the carburetor of the car, and no one finds them.

A huge, expensive wall will still have to have border crossings for vehicles. A huge, expensive wall could still have tunnels dug beneath it. In reality, a combination of drones and fencing and other more sophisticated means would be a much more effective way to secure the border.

Fifth, in order to build the wall, the President--the Federal Government--would need to take private land, using eminent domain from thousands of law-abiding Americans. Much of the

land on the border is privately owned. It is not owned by the Federal Government. Eminent domain? A lot of people on that side of the aisle don't like it, and we all know it would take a very long time to get it done.

For those reasons, it is not just Democrats who oppose the wall, many Republicans oppose the wall. According to a Wall Street Journal survey: ``Not a single member of Congress who represents the territory on the southwest border said they support President Trump's request for $1.4 billion to begin construction of his promised wall.'' That includes my friends Senators Cornyn, Cruz, McCain, and Flake.

For the very same reasons, the American people don't support the idea of a border wall by almost a 2-to-1 margin. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 64 percent of Americans oppose a wall on the border with Mexico, versus only 33 percent who favor it, and that poll didn't even include the fact that Mexico would not be paying for it under the President's plan.

Now, I say to my colleagues and to President Trump, we Democrats don't mind having a debate on the wall in regular order. We don't think it would pass, given the amount of opposition on both sides, but certainly a proposal with as many flaws as this one shouldn't be the thing the administration uses to hold the government hostage and certainly shouldn't be pushed through without debate, without regular order, without answers to these questions.

Mr. President, now, let's talk a little bit about the President's first 100 days. We are approaching the 100-day mark of the Trump Presidency. It is an appropriate time to take stock of what this President has accomplished so far. Unfortunately, it is not much.

In the first 100 days, so many of the promises the President made to working families during the campaign have either been broken outright or remain unfulfilled.

The President ran as a populist. I have said this to him. The President ran as a populist against both the Democratic and the Republican establishments, promising to stick up for the American worker. He talked like a different kind of Republican who might be willing to work with Democrats, particularly on issues like trade or infrastructure. Instead, the President has spent the first 100 days governing from the far right on behalf of the powerful and the special interests he once campaigned against, breaking his promise to be a President for the American worker--the forgotten men and women, as he called them. It sure didn't take long for the President to forget them too.

The President has broken promises or has yet to fulfill them in areas that matter to so many of his voters and to so many Americans, whether they voted for him or not. He promised he would drain the swamp, right? He talked about it over and over again. He promised he would drain the swamp, but instead he has filled his Cabinet with billionaires and bankers. And listen to this: He has given out secret waivers that allow lobbyists to work in his administration on the very issues they previously lobbied on. That is not draining the swamp. That is filling it up to the brim, going far beyond what others have done.

He said he would deliver better healthcare that would cost less and provide more benefits. At one point, he said we are going to give healthcare to everybody, but his bill, TrumpCare, does the exact opposite, providing fewer benefits at higher costs, all to finance a massive tax break for the wealthy.

He promised a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. We Democrats sent him our proposal--a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, taking the number he talked about in the campaign--over a month ago. We haven't seen any proposal or gotten any response from the President.

The President promised he would be tough on trade, outsourcing, and jobs. He promised he would label China a currency manipulator and fight back against their rapacious trade policies which robbed America of millions of jobs and cost trillions of dollars of our wealth. He hasn't done that either.

The 2018 budget he proposed is a dagger to the heart of the middle class, cutting some of the programs that matter to the middle class most, including transportation, education, and scientific research.

So as we head into the 100-day mark, Democrats are going to hold the President accountable for the promises he made to working-class voters. We obviously disagreed with a lot of what he said in the campaign, but he made a number of promises to working-class voters that we could have helped him to accomplish. Unfortunately, he has abandoned those promises in favor of a hard-right, special interest agenda.

We can work together, but only if President Trump and Republicans actually seek Democratic input and are willing to compromise. Right now it seems the President's idea of compromise is never talk to Democrats, put forward his own Republican proposal, and pressure us to support it; never talk to Democrats, that is, about the issues he is moving forward. I have talked to him, but it is never on the issues that are before us. That is not the way our politics have ever worked. Unless the President's approach changes, the next 100 days will be just like the first: a whole lot of talk and no progress, a series of broken or unfulfilled promises to the working families of America.