Floor Statements

Madam President, families lose, and billionaires win. That is the Republican plan. It is a plan that slashes $1.5 to $2 trillion from programs that families depend on. And why? To fund tax cuts for the very richest Americans.

But that is not all the bad news because there are additional tax cuts for the best and richest in the country--the richest Americans-- and those are unpaid for, and that means debt.

How much more debt does this bill create? The current estimate--and the estimates keep going up--is $5.3 trillion of unpaid-for tax cuts over the next 10 years--$5.3 trillion--trillion with a ``t''--over the next 10 years.

But that is not all. Their plan provides for $37 trillion--at least $37 trillion--in additional debt over the next 30 years. This is a phenomenal, phenomenal number.

And, third, they say: We will tell the American people it adds no new debt; passing this bill adds no new debt.

That is quite a set of plans: slash programs for regular Americans, enrich the richest Americans, run up an additional $37 trillion in debt, and then lie to the American people and say it doesn't cost a thing.

It has become clear, over the last 2 days, about how Republicans are going to justify this. They say they are going to use section 312-- section 312--of the law. Section 312, they say, says that the cost of a program or the impact of a revenue cut through a tax giveaway to the wealthy only costs what the budget chair says it costs. Just take the chair's word for it.

This is the magic wand. It will add $37 trillion to the debt, but if the budget chair says it doesn't, then you just pretend it doesn't. It is kind of like the situation where the king wears the magic robes--at least he thinks he is wearing magic robes, but he is actually walking down the street naked because he doesn't have magic robes--in this case, again, lying to the public about the cost.

In the real world, you have real math. In this special new world under the Republican plan, you have the magic math.

This was not the vision that was laid out back 51 years ago, in 1974, when the Senate created, along with the House, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act.

That act had three pillars. The first pillar was that in a 10-year period, you have to decrease the deficit with the provisions that were in the bill. And then, every year after, in every category, it either has to be deficit-neutral or reduce the deficit according to the provisions that are in the bill.

Then it said we are going to use honest numbers. Before, there had been a lot of smoke and mirrors. There had been a lot of gimmicks. And people on both sides said: No, no, we don't want to do that.

Democrats and Republicans said: Let's use honest numbers. Let's create a Congressional Budget Office to give us impartial numbers so we can be honest among ourselves, have a real debate about any given policy provision or any particular revenue provision, and we can be honest with the American people because, otherwise, we will just keep running up more and more deficits while pretending we are not.

My Republican colleagues initially said: Do you know what? We will just put a clause into the budget resolution. It is called a scoring rule, and that scoring rule will simply say that we are going to say this costs nothing, that there is no additional debt.

A scoring rule has been used in the past. OK, it has been used in multiple years, but it was used to resolve little anomalies in tricky, little twists and changes in revenue bills or in policies' programs. It was always narrow. It always was honest about what it was trying to solve and explainable to the public. It was always consistent with the law, and it was always involving modest sums--modest by standards of the national budget.

Certainly, now, this scoring rule that had been proposed by the Republicans, it was not bipartisan. It was not narrow. It was not improving the budget. It, in fact, was lying about the budgeting. It was not consistent with the law. And it was massive--$37 trillion.

So my colleagues across the aisle, when we pointed this out, they said: Yes, we had better not do that. That is just wrong.

OK. Thank you. Thank you for deciding not to put in a scoring rule that was completely wrong and designed to destroy the budget process.

But now my colleagues across the aisle have said: We will use a different provision called section 312. We won't use the scoring rule. Instead, we are going to go in a different direction that says simply that the cost is what the chair of the Budget Committee says it is.

Now, I want to turn back the clock a little bit. I want to turn back the clock and point out that there were core principles in that 1974 bill, and they were driven by growing bipartisan concern about deficits and debt.

In the 1958 to 1968 decade, the average deficit was about $5 billion per year. That doesn't sound like much now, by our standards, when we are looking at $2 trillion per year, but it was a lot compared to the past. And folks said: Do you know what? That $5 billion per year over that 10 years exploded to an average of $20 billion a year in 1971 through 1973. Oh, my goodness, it quadrupled. We have got to get a handle on these deficits. We don't want to run up the debt--this fourfold increase in annual deficits adding to the debt.

So Democrats and Republicans came together, and they passed the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act. It created a superhighway for this special effort to reduce deficits--a superhighway; a super, filibuster- free highway.

Now, you all may remember Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Robert Byrd was always the fiercest defender of the filibuster. But he, along with 99 other Senators, said: We will create one exception, and that exception will be to reduce the deficit.

And it had these three pillars, which I will mention again. It has to reduce the deficit. The provisions of the bill have to reduce the deficit over the first 10 years. They have to be deficit-neutral in every category in each year after the first 10 years. And we have to use honest numbers.

And to have those honest numbers, we will create the Congressional Budget Office, an impartial body. We will no longer use smoke and mirrors, pretend that things don't cost money when they do cost money.

But then what happened? I will tell you. For 22 years, it worked pretty well. Then along comes the Gingrich revolution, the 1994 election. Now we have the 1995 through 1997 biennium. Some things happened then that, well, one maybe couldn't have foreseen. Maybe they could have. There was an effort to do a balanced budget amendment. It fell one vote short here in the Senate Chamber. It needed 67 votes; it only got 66.

Then there was: We will do a line-item veto--and that was passed. But that gave the power to the President to strike down any line.

The Supreme Court said: No, you can't do that. You can't delegate the power of the purse. The power of the purse belongs with Congress. So that fell.

Then the Republican caucus in charge said: We are going to, instead, do a big tax bill giving enormous benefits to the richest Americans.

Then they said: You know, the problem with that is the Democrats won't work with us. They won't give us 60 votes to do that. Oh, I know, they said, we will do a nuclear option. We will repurpose the deficit- decreasing bill from 1974 and say that it can be used in order to actually increase deficits with tax cuts.

And they succeeded. They had the votes. They repurposed the bill. They blew up the first pillar of those three pillars. That first pillar was the reconciliation process, this special process created in 1974 that can only be used to reduce deficits in the first 10 years.

They blew it up and said: OK. Nuclear option. We have reinterpreted the rule. It can be used to increase deficits.

Well, that was a huge, huge damage to the goal of reducing deficits, and deficits have gone up ever since.

When that happened--when that happened--there was a big protest on the floor. The first Budget Committee chair who passed the reconciliation bill consistent with decreasing deficits was South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings. He said:

The whole idea of reconciliation--and I am giving you

firsthand history: It is honest as the day is long--was to,

by gosh, to cut back on the deficit.

That is what it was for. So the Republicans blew up that pillar, all designed to reduce the deficits, and, instead, repurposed it for increasing the deficits. Pillar No. 1 drops.

But, at the same time, the second pillar, that no increase in deficits could occur after 10 years, was sustained by the Chair sitting and presiding over the Senate, and that was Senator Daschle.

Senator Daschle said--well, actually, he asked the question. He was asking the question of the Republican Chair.

He said:

If this reconciliation bill does not find a way to end or

offset its tax cuts in the years beyond 2002--

That is beyond 10 years--

would the bill violate the Byrd rule?

And the Presiding Officer responded:

Yes, it would.

So the second pillar, no deficits in any category beyond 10 years, was preserved--until now.

That was in 1996, and here we are, 29 years later. Now there is a goal to destroy the second and third pillars of the 1974 bill.

I must say, this is extremely extraordinary and disturbing that my Republican colleagues, who run on fiscal responsibility, destroyed the first pillar of the special system to reduce deficits in 1996, and tonight, they are proposing to destroy the second and third pillars.

In that second pillar, no deficits beyond year 10; every category, every year has to be deficit-neutral or reduce the deficit.

We can compare that to the law that has just been put forward--or the guidance that has just been put forward. We can look at year 11, the instructions that go in every category--year 12, year 13, year 20, year 100. It goes on forever, into the future, and the Republican bill guidance fails the Byrd test.

Now, the Byrd test really gets applied in a second stage of the reconciliation process. We are in the budget resolution that sends instructions to committees. Those committees will send back specific revenue provisions: increase this revenue here, reduce it there, proceed to add this policy program, reduce this policy program. When it comes back, every category--that is, every title--of the reconciliation bill, in every single year, by the Byrd rule, has to be deficit-neutral or decrease the deficit.

So we will have that debate, but we will have that debate when the reconciliation bill comes back from committee to this floor because my Republican colleagues decided to postpone that debate by taking the scoring rule out of their proposed budget resolution and said: We will kick it down the road to the next stage.

And, certainly, we will be here, fiercely defending the deficit- reducing vision of pillars 2 and 3--pillar 2: no deficit in any category or any title of the bill beyond year 10; and pillar 3: use honest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. That pillar has survived since 1974. We even put that pillar into law specifically in 1985 in a bipartisan way. We wanted to emphasize how important that was.

Just think about how much more important this process of deficit reduction, special rule of the reconciliation bill, is today than it was back in 1974. In 1974, the debt-to-GDP ratio: 23 percent. Tonight, in 2025, it is 100 percent. It is equal to the entire gross domestic product of the United States. In 1974, the annual deficit was about $6 billion. Today, it is $2 trillion. In 1974, total debt: $475 billion. Today, it is $37 trillion.

Now, consider this: All of the debt run up over the last 249 years since the Declaration of Independence, right now, is just a little bit less than $37 trillion. In this single bill--this single bill-- Republicans are saying we will add $37 trillion more--at least that much. When the numbers really come out, we expect it to be higher, but $37 trillion more to the debt. That is a much bigger burden on the future.

And what do the economists say about that bigger burden? They said it will increase interest rates that families have to pay on their mortgage and on their car loan since it will decrease the capital available to private industry and slow down our economy.

This magic math goes by the name of ``current policy baseline.'' It sounds very academic, but it is essentially the big lie.

Consider this: You sign a contract to rent a home for a year, and renting that home costs $2,000 per month so you know you are going to have to pay $24,000 over the year. And at the end of the year, you say: You know what, I am going to renew that agreement to rent this apartment. And your spouse says: You know what, that is going to cost us another $24,000 in rent.

And you say: No. I am using the Republican magic math. It won't cost a single dime because we will just pretend that a year ago we had planned to rent the apartment for a second year; and therefore, it is no more than we thought we would pay a year ago--except a year ago you said you were only going to rent the house for a year. In other words, it is a big lie.

It is the very smoke and mirrors, the very gimmicks that Democrats and Republicans came together and stopped back in 1974. Fifty-one years ago, we said this game of lying to the public has to end. But tonight, my Republican colleagues are saying that game will continue if they have their way.

Well, we say they must not have their way. We are going to stand up and say no to families lose and billionaires win. We are going to say no to magic math that lies to the American people about the cost of their bill, driven by massive tax cuts to the richest Americans.

It is a simple request: honesty and integrity. We should not be engaging in a big lie, and Democrats will have no part of it. We are going to be honest about what every provision of the reconciliation bill costs. We are going to be determined to make sure that the Byrd rule stands.

Mr. President and colleagues, back in 1974, the Senate and the House were very agitated over the increases in the national annual deficit that was adding considerably to the national debt. They said we needed to do something about this. The levels that they were concerned about at that time seem so small, to date. The debt-to-GDP ratio was 23 percent. Now we are over 100 percent. The annual deficit was about $6 billion. Now we are at about $2 trillion of annual deficit. The total debt was only a third of a trillion rather than, now, $37 trillion.

But those increases were seen as such a threat to the future of our Nation that Democrats and Republicans together, House Members and the Senate together, said: We have to get this under control. So they created a bill--the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act--to say: We can't let this go forward.

Here is what it did. First of all, it created a fast-track for a special bill called a reconciliation bill that would reduce the deficit and not add more to the debt.

Second of all, it says that we have to have integrity in numbers. When Republicans are in charge, they tend to increase the deficits and then want to use smoke screens in order to say: We are not really doing that. When the Democrats are in charge, the same thing. They both wanted to undertake strategies that increase the deficit but pretend they were being fiscally responsible.

So they said: We must have integrity on the numbers, so we are going to create a new organization. The Congressional Budget Office will be an independent assessor of the cost of any change in law related to programs or related to tax revenue. Honesty and integrity will be the foundation for the debate that takes place in this Chamber. Honesty and integrity will be the foundation for the debate that takes place in the House Chamber down the hall. Honesty and integrity in numbers will be the foundation for the American people who are following the decision making that is made by their representatives in the House and Senate.

So two pillars: a fast-track for reducing deficits--a reconciliation bill; and integrity in numbers by using the Congressional Budget Office--creating it and using their numbers to have honesty in the debate on policy and revenue plans.

Well, that first pillar was destroyed in 1996 by a nuclear option done by the Republican majority, who said: Do you know what, we are going to reinterpret the law. So instead of just using this fast-track to reduce the deficit, we are going to also use it for tax policy that will increase the deficit.

Today, the second pillar of integrity in the numbers is under attack by the Republican majority. They have lost their minds when it comes to fiscal responsibility. They destroyed first, a couple of decades ago, the fast-track dedicated only to deficit reduction, and now they want to destroy the integrity in the accounting for what a tax policy costs or what a program policy costs--all for a simple purpose, and that is, they have a plan. That plan is to put forward a proposal that would cost an additional amount to the debt of $37 trillion over the next 30 years. But they want to tell this Chamber that that $37 trillion addition to the debt is actually a zero-dollar addition. They want to tell the American people that that $37 trillion addition to the national debt that is in their plan is actually a zero-dollar addition.

I can tell you that a $37 trillion deception--that is not a minor fraud; that is a major fraud. In the process, they are destroying the integrity not just for this budget cycle but for every budget cycle to come.

The gimmick they are putting forward to accomplish this diabolical plot is called current policy baseline. Why do they want to pursue this Republican plan? Because they want to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and do so not only for a 10-year period but for permanent tax breaks into the future. It is not just magic math. I mean, that is almost too nice of a name to give to it. It is devastating fraud.

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a report requested by a Republican Congressman, David Schweikert. He had asked them: How much will this fraud cost, this Republican plan cost? The CBO laid it out--$37 trillion of additional debt over the next 30 years.

It so happens that right now, our current national debt is just shy of $37 trillion. They want to say the debt that has been run up in the last 250 years--next year, we will be celebrating our 250th year as a nation. The debt that has been run up over this first 250 years--we are going to add that additional amount with one bill, with one vote, in this budget cycle. This is fraud on an unparalleled scale.

Schweikert then said:

Anyone that says current policy baseline [is the right way

to go] is engaging in intellectual and economic fraud . . .

it's intellectually lazy. My basic mission in life is just to

try to create some honest math.

Honest math is what Democrats and Republicans together said they were pursuing in 1974--House and Senate together--honest math. Honest math is on the verge of destruction.

Chip Roy of Texas said this plan--referring to the plan--``This is fairy dust, and they're full of crap. And I'm gonna call them out on it.''

Anyone who cares about growing deficits and growing debt should call them out on it--$37 trillion in this Republican plan of additional debt and then adopting a gimmick to tell the American people and this Chamber it costs zero.

In the free market, businesses need transparency--transparency so investors can decide if things are going in the right direction, so the board of directors of a company can change direction. They know that they have to have integrity in their numbers. They know that it is important for their board of directors. They also know that it is important for those who buy their stock, the investors. Without honest numbers, they can't make good decisions about where they are going.

The same is true for us in government. If we are not willing to use honest numbers, we can't make good decisions about how we go forward. It is that important. Integrity and honesty in our numbers are that important.

That is the debate we need to have, an honest examination. Are you for or against a plan that will add $37 trillion to the debt on top of what additions might otherwise happen under current law? That is the question we will be facing.

This idea of integrity in the numbers existed before the 1974 Budget Control Act, but it was so important to have outside numbers that people could rely on--independent numbers, bipartisan numbers or nonpartisan numbers--that they created a whole Agency, the Congressional Budget Office, to produce those numbers. It is that essential, so you don't have some think tank giving you pretend numbers from the right or some other think tank giving you pretend numbers from the left. It is that important.

You know, this plan, this Republican plan, is like a landlord saying: Don't worry. Your rent is free over the next 30 years because we are not making any changes to your tenant contract.

What a farce because you know you have to keep paying that rent every single month.

So there is $37 trillion of additional debt being hidden through a gimmick.

I pointed out this enormous addition to the debt, but what is the purpose? It is to give tax giveaways to the richest Americans. Sixty percent of the additional debt goes to the richest 10 percent in America. Half of that additional debt, $37 trillion, half of it goes to the richest 5 percent of Americans. So they are not just running up $37 trillion in additional debt; they are running up $37 trillion in additional debt to give the vast majority to the already richest Americans. This is a straightforward, simple provision in which families lose and billionaires win.

They are going to attack the spending on Medicaid. That is health insurance that a good third of America, approximately, relies on, that veterans rely on, programs that those with disabilities rely on. They are going to attack that program for tax giveaways to the richest Americans. They are going to steal from Social Security and make it dysfunctional--already, the lines are starting to pile up, and the phones aren't answered--in order to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. They are going to betray working families with a tax on healthcare, housing, and education. Why? To give massive tax breaks to the richest Americans.

The situation is clear: Families lose, and billionaires win.

Democrats are paying attention. My colleagues the Republicans need to pay attention. They said when they were running that they are for fiscal responsibility, that they are for decreasing the deficit, but, in fact, their plan increases the deficits massively--an additional $4 trillion over the next 2 years and an additional $37 trillion in debt over the next 30 years--to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while slashing programs that help ordinary working families to thrive.

This is a vast betrayal of Trump's campaign plan. He campaigned on being a champion for families. But that was a campaign. Now he is in office, and the real plan? Families lose; billionaires win.

We must reject this gimmick that destroys the integrity of the budgeting process. One pillar--a filibuster-free pathway for deficit reduction--was destroyed by my Republican colleagues in 1996. The second pillar--integrity in numbers using an outside, independent CBO to give us honest numbers to work with here and for the American people--is going to be destroyed under current policy baseline being proposed right now.

Be awake, pay attention, and say hell no to this massive fraud on the American people.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Brian Lyons, communications director for the Budget Committee, be given full access to the floor for the balance of his service.

Mr. President, today I commend the Friends of Mt. Tabor Park (FMTP) for its 25 years of unwavering dedication to preserving and enhancing one of Portland's most treasured urban green spaces.

Mt. Tabor Park is not just a place of natural beauty; it is a community asset, a sanctuary for recreation, and a reflection of Oregon's deep commitment to environmental stewardship. Since its founding in 2000, FTMP and its dedicated volunteers have served as stewards, educators, and protectors of this cherished space, ensuring that the park continues to be a welcoming environment for all.

Over the years, FMTP has worked hand in hand with the Portland Parks & Recreation, complementing city services and mobilizing a near- constant presence of engaged volunteers. Its commitment has helped maintain public safety, beautify and protect our natural spaces, and sustain opportunities for community programming--even in the most challenging times, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its work is a model of civic engagement and a testament to what is possible when a community comes together with purpose and passion.

As FMTP celebrates 25 years of service, we honor its profound impact on Portland's livability and the countless individuals who have given their time and energy to preserve the urban oasis. I extend my deepest gratitude to the FTMP and look forward to its continued success in the next 25 years and beyond. Congratulations on this milestone anniversary and thank you for your tireless commitment to the people and natural spaces of Portland.

Mr. President, I would ask unanimous consent that privileges of the floor be granted to Nathan Sansone today, my shadow intern.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1273 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, colleagues, let me keep this very simple. We provided a lot of funding in the Inflation Reduction Act so that those who have very sophisticated finances and very powerful advisers that try to avoid ever paying their taxes don't get away with it, because it is a fundamental fairness all across America.

Ordinary working people have the money taken out of their paychecks every week. Just because people have enormous paychecks and fancy consultants, it shouldn't mean that they get a license to cheat.

And all of that money went to make sure that those upper income folks knew that somebody might be taking a look at their finances.

If this amendment fails, it will increase the deficit by $46 billion. So I hope all of you who are fiscally responsible and care about fundamental fairness to workers across America will vote for this amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for my intern Ellie White to have privileges of the floor.

Mr. President, here is the question: Do we pursue the 20th century energy vision featuring dirty, expensive fossil fuels, or do we pursue the 21st century energy vision featuring inexpensive and clean, renewable energy?

Trump's energy emergency declaration is about one thing: He is choosing the strategy of dirty, expensive fossil fuels. You know, he asked the powerful, big oil companies to contribute a billion dollars to his campaign, and now he is paying them back at the expense of the American people. Families lose; billionaires win.

The plan. The plan features giving fossil fuel companies the power to seize public lands. It features giving fossil fuel companies the power to skip environmental assessments, environmental assessments that show how their projects will poison the air, pollute the water, kill wildlife, and despoil our ecosystems.

It is the plan of giving fossil fuel companies the power to bypass the public comment period so the public can't weigh in about the terrible ideas the fossil fuel companies are putting forward.

The public can't weigh in about the drilling rigs and the leaky pipelines and the export terminals polluting their communities. This is not government of, by, and for the people; it is government of, by, and for the oil and gas companies. Families lose; billionaires win.

This emergency declaration is certainly a sham because renewable energy costs less than fossil fuel energy. The International Renewable Energy Agency found that the cost of new wind or solar is at least 30 percent cheaper than the cost of running most fossil coal plants. So it is no surprise that in 2024, 94 percent of the new energy on the grid came from renewables, from harnessing the power of the sun and the wind.

Prioritizing expensive fossil fuels over cheap renewables drives up the price of energy that families pay on their bills every month. That is Trumpflation.

Exporting more fossil fuels mean families pay more at the pump, and they pay more to heat their homes. That is Trumpflation.

And burning more fossil fuels intensifies climate chaos and wildfires and

hurricanes. It blows the top off the cost of insurance for people's homes as insurers flee the markets. That is Trumpflation.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies make even bigger profits. Families lose; billionaires win.

You know, this is not a red State or a blue State issue. Since August 2022, investments from the Inflation Reduction Act have created more than 400,000 clean energy jobs with more than half of those jobs in red States. In fact, 19 of the 20 Congressional districts at the top of clean energy investments are represented by my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle.

What are the top three States overall of clean energy job growth? Idaho, Texas, and New Mexico--two out of those three States represented by Republicans in the Senate. For wind energy, it is Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois--four out of five States represented in this Senate by Republicans. For solar energy it is California, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona--three out of five of those States represented by Republicans.

So this is not a blue versus red situation. Nearly 3.5 million Americans now work in the clean energy field, more than a million of those jobs in red States. And it is estimated that these investments will continue to create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country.

Prioritizing fossil fuels will kill this job growth for working Americans. So this strategy, this energy emergency strategy, this is an energy strategy in which families lose; billionaires win. And there are far fewer good-paying jobs for Americans.

And, by the way, prioritizing fossil fuels is helpful to China.

If we have a national energy emergency, we shouldn't be fueling our competitors by selling our energy to China to make their economy run better. If we have an emergency, we shouldn't cede the future of clean energy and all the jobs it will create and the less expensive energy it creates to China. We would want to make these products here and export them to the world, not have to buy them from China, helping China's economy grow at the expense of our own.

This phony national emergency declaration comes down to this: Do we want families to win or do we want billionaires to win?

Let's come together, red States and blue States together, and say: We want these jobs. We want this clean energy. We want this less expensive energy for America because we are fighting for the families, not for the billionaires.

Mr. President, families lose, billionaires win. That is the proposition at the heart of the Republican budget resolution. Now, this plan is going to be explored tonight through a series of amendments.

As the American people watch how we vote on these amendments, it will become clearer and clearer what it is all about; families lose, billionaires win.

We will see tonight that Democrats vote against irreparable increases to the deficit, and Republicans vote to explode the deficit.

We will see tonight, Democrats vote against tax giveaways to the billionaires, and Republicans vote for tax giveaways to the billionaires.

We will see tonight, Democrats vote again and again to protect programs that support families while Republicans vote time and time again to slash those programs, those programs that families depend on to be on their feet and to thrive, to move into the middle class, to move beyond the middle class, to know with confidence that their children will have a strong foundation for growing up.

That is what we will see tonight; families lose, and billionaires win. Democrats will fight this terrible vision for America in every single way we can.

Now, our Republican colleagues earlier on the floor said: Oh, no, no. This bill is nothing except a little bit about border security and national security.

If that were true, then why isn't this a conversation in the spending committee, the Appropriations Committee? If that were true, why did our Republican colleagues repeatedly block bipartisan border and Defense bills?

Last year, the Appropriations Committee passed a strong bipartisan defense bill. Let's pass it. Last year, the Senate negotiated a bipartisan border deal, and Donald Trump, the candidate, killed it saying he wanted to exploit the issue of immigration on the campaign trail. Well, the campaign is over. There is a path now for that same bipartisan bill on the border.

All of this makes it absolutely clear that this bill is not about border and defense. This bill is all about this; families losing, billionaires winning.

This bill has a budget table that relays that they are going to slash $1 trillion in programs for families in just the last 6 months of this fiscal year--between now and September 30--and to do so, to fund more tax giveaways to megamillionaires and billionaires, cut the programs for families to fund tax cuts for billionaires. That is what this is about.

We saw that also last Wednesday in the Budget Committee. Democrats offered amendment after amendment to protect the programs, and what did we see to protect against the rising cost of groceries? Democrats voted for that protection; Republicans rejected it.

Make sure that we don't lose the tax credits that enable the middle class to buy health insurance on the exchange? Democrats defended those credits; Republicans voted against it.

Attack Medicaid, healthcare for the poor? Democrats voted to protect Medicaid, and Republicans voted against it.

Lower the price of prescription drugs so we don't pay more than people in other countries? Democrats voted for that protection; Republicans rejected it.

And on and on. Renting or buying a home, controlling the costs? Democrats voted to defend and lower housing costs; Republicans rejected it.

Making college more expensive? Democrats said: No way. We voted against that. Republicans rejected it so they could raise costs of college loans and childcare.

That is what this bill is about; families lose, and billionaires win. Republicans rejected every single amendment to help families stand on their feet and thrive, and families are going to pay a much higher price. In fact, this budget resolution opens the door to higher prices on groceries. That is Trumpflation. Trumpflation has arrived. This budget opens the door to making healthcare more expensive, both for low-income families and for middle-class families.

Trumpflation, this budget opens the door to making college more expensive. I was the first in my family to go to college. It was a really big deal that we found a way to be able to afford to go.

My family helped out, and I worked my way all through college. Making it more expensive, that is wrong. Trumpflation has arrived in the form of making college more expensive--all of this strategy to increase the costs for Americans.

Boy, I am not getting any calls to my office. Are you getting any calls to your office, colleagues? Saying we want to raise the cost for Americans? Didn't I hear Trump on the campaign trail saying he was all about lowering costs?

But tonight, this bill is about Trumpflation increasing the cost of goods to ordinary Americans. Yes, it is about decreasing the cost to billionaires through massive tax cuts. This bill is all about helping the billionaire team.

But those thousands of phone calls I have gotten--some days I have had over 2,000 phone calls--not one--not one single one said: We want Trumpflation. Not one single one said: We want tax cuts for billionaires. Not one single call at 2,000 a day said: We want you to cut the programs that enable families to be on their feet in healthcare and housing and education and childcare.

Candidate Trump is a different person from President Trump. Candidate Trump said: I am running to fight for families. But now who is he fighting for? He is fighting for the megamillionaires and the billionaires. This is a great betrayal.

And this connection exists between cutting the programs for families and funding tax giveaways to those megamillionaires and billionaires, and we have seen this movie before. We saw it in the 2017 strategy during the last Trump administration. They did a tax bill and almost all the money went to the wealthiest Americans.

So this isn't some, like, fiction about President Trump. This is a clear replay of the Republican plan. They did it before, and they are doing it again.

Now, you probably heard the expression during your life: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Well, America, you are getting fooled a second time. This is the great betrayal. Let's not let that happen.

We will fight it here, but it is going to take American citizens rising up to their feet, getting off of the couch, joining organizations, making their voice heard. That is what is going to make the difference in the course of what happens here in Congress. It is the voice of the people on the streets, as well as the battle we lead inside this Chamber, that is going to save us from Trumpflation, that is going to save us from the plan that attacks families and feathers the nests of billionaires.

This connection between cutting programs for families and increasing tax giveaways for billionaires, it is actually in the Republican bill on the House side. They made it explicit.

This House language says for every additional dollar they cut from the safety net, they can give away an additional dollar to billionaires in tax cuts.

It is in the Republican bill in the House just down the hall. That is a pretty remarkable and bold thing to lay out for all of America to read. There is an additional factor here in the Republican plan, and that is to run the Nation deeper into debt.

We have seen this play again before. Each of these bars represents an administration. The first President Bush administration, the Clinton administration, George W. Bush, his 8 years, Obama's 8 years, Trump's 4 years, Biden's 4 years, and what you see is the difference between the deficit their first year in office and their last year in office.

So what happened over the course of H.W. Bush's 4 years is the deficit went up. What you see in Clinton's 8 years is the annual deficit went down. His last deficit was not even a deficit, it was a surplus.

George W. Bush came along and said: Let's run that deficit right back up,

and he did it, 8 years; a lot more deficit in his eighth year than his first year. Obama came along and set fiscal discipline. Let's lower that deficit, and he lowered it year after year from his first year to his eighth year.

And then we come to the first Trump administration, and he just blew the top off it all. Talk about the biggest contributor, the biggest deficits, the biggest contributors to national debt, it is the first Trump administration. And along comes the Biden administration and says: We have got to lower those deficits; and in his 4 years, his fourth deficit was much lower than his first.

Now we are seeing Trump II, and this budget plan tonight, that is this bar. This is going back up. Maybe not as large to be planned as Trump I in terms of that, but absolutely going in the wrong direction.

So it is a mystery. My Republican colleagues, they campaign as fiscally conservative. They say they are going to lower the deficit, and every single time they fool us. They come in here, they cut the taxes for the richest Americans, revenues proceed to fail to compensate, and they run up the deficit.

And now they are going to do it again if we let this budget resolution pass. So let's not let it pass. Let's oppose it.

Republican colleagues, come and join us in fiscal responsibility and take this budget resolution that is laying out a vision of more and more deficits and more and more debt and put it in the woodchipper.

We have been hearing a lot about the woodchipper. Take this plan that cuts programs for families and put it in the woodchipper. Take this plan that gives tax giveaways to the richest Americans--the megamillionaires and the billionaires--and put it in the woodchipper because it is wrong for America to attack the programs for families in order to fund tax giveaways to billionaires.

President Trump has said he wants a ``big, beautiful''--beautiful-- ``bill.'' But you know what? There is nothing beautiful about the bill that is on the floor tonight. There is nothing beautiful about destroying the programs families depend on. There is nothing beautiful about using those cuts to fund tax cuts for billionaires. There is nothing beautiful about running up the deficits and debt Republican- style that they do every single time.

What we have right now is not government by and for the people. What we have right now is by and for the billionaires. President Trump made that very clear at his inaugural address. Who do we have standing right behind him? Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire of Facebook; at this end, the scowl on his face, Elon Musk, CEO of so many companies, including Tesla. Who do we have? Jeff Bezos of Amazon, one of the richest men in the world along with Elon Musk. And we have Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, the mother company of Google. By and for billionaires, that is what that is all about.

So Democrats will not rest tonight until we vote on each of our amendments to protect working families. We will not rest tonight till we vote on each of our amendments to stop the tax giveaways to billionaires. And tonight, Democrats will be fighting by ourselves, inviting our Republican colleagues to join us.

But we will not be fighting for ourselves alone; we are fighting for the American family. This Republican budget, it is the great betrayal; and we, the Democrats, will fight to stop it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 473 and ask that it be reported by number.

Madam President, colleagues, the dream of home ownership is dying, and this is a big deal. Your home is your castle. This is a major source of wealth for middle-class families. And a factor killing the dream of home ownership is private equity and hedge funds buying up homes all across America.

In fact, ordinary families can't compete with their all-cash, no inspection offers. They are driving up the prices to buy homes. They are driving up the rent. So today, let's take a step toward restoring the dream of homeownership. This is a deficit-neutral reserve fund that creates incentives for private-equity hedge funds to ease their way out of this market so that families can continue to be homeowners in America, their children can continue to be homeowners.

Let's not let this dream die on our watch. I encourage you to vote for this because houses should be homes for families, not a profit center for Wall Street.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, all evening we have been pointing out that, with this bill, families lose and billionaires win. That is certainly put onto steroids with this amendment because this amendment would add a quarter trillion dollars directed at the SNAP program. It would add a third of a trillion dollars directed at reducing the viability of student loans, and almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars to devastate Medicaid--programs that families depend on to be able to thrive, to live in the middle class, to pursue opportunity.

I encourage everyone, if you don't want to have a bill in which families lose, vote no.

Vote on Amendment No. 999

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1207 and ask that it be reported by number.

Colleagues, this amendment encourages the opportunity for Americans to purchase prescription drugs at or near the lower prices that manufacturers charge to individuals in other similar, developed nations.

Here is what every American knows: We all invest more in the research and development to develop drugs than the taxpayers of any other nation in the entire world, so we should be getting the best price, not the worst price. This amendment creates an opportunity for us to serve the American people and get them the fair prices they deserve.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I so much appreciate the collaboration and cooperation and communication between the Budget team here on this side of the aisle and Senator Graham's team.

We have had the chance to all be on the floor and have the discussion about issues that we rarely get to have. It isn't quite the give-and- take that you might see in some legislatures, but we are, in fact, here wrestling with the national issues.

This budget resolution comes down to one thing, and that is that families lose and billionaires win. I said at the beginning of the night that over the course of the evening, amendments would show that Democrats are standing up for families--on groceries, on healthcare, on housing, on education, on childcare--and that is what has been demonstrated tonight.

I still invite our Republican colleagues to join us--join with us-- and help the families of America rather than attacking the programs that serve them in order to fund tax giveaways for billionaires. Tax giveaways for billionaires will not make our Nation stronger; stronger families will make our Nation stronger.

Vote on S. Con. Res. 7

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Chance Mitchell, a law clerk on the Budget Committee minority staff, be granted floor privileges during consideration of S. Con. Res. 7.

Mr. President, this evening we had a vote on the motion to proceed to the Republican budget resolution, and that passed. It was a simple majority vote. And this budget resolution has a very simple, straightforward theme: Families lose, and billionaires win.

The plan is simple: Slash programs for families, give massive tax giveaways to millionaires and billionaires, and run the country deeper into debt.

That is not a plan that my constituents back home would vote for or support. They don't want to see the programs that enable families to stand on their feet be slashed or destroyed. They don't think that our megamillionaires and billionaires need more massive giveaways, and they certainly don't want to see the debt run up in the process. But that is where we are.

Now, my Republican colleagues might say: Well, not so fast. This bill is really about securing our border and national defense.

But don't let that fool you. Senate Democrats are happy to entertain an appropriations bill to address these issues. In fact, we had a strong, bipartisan defense spending bill in the Appropriations Committee last year. Senate Democrats also supported a bipartisan immigration bill, and that was just a year ago May; but the bill was killed. Bipartisan, negotiated bill was killed when then-Candidate Trump said: Senate Republicans, I don't want you to fix the problem. I want to have this as a campaign element, the chaos at the border, so don't fix it.

So it was killed. So you have Democrats ready to work on national defense, as we have in the past, and willing to work on security at the border.

So this bill is not about that. This bill is about this: Slashing programs

for families, giving massive tax giveaways to the richest Americans. That is the real soul of the Republican budget resolution.

Now, this resolution proposes over $9 trillion in cuts to programs. Just look at the budget table that accompanies the resolution. You will see it in there. Basically, it has a line: unallocated cuts, $9 trillion--and that includes cutting a trillion dollars out of the programs in the last 6 months of this year.

One of our colleagues on the Republican side did an amendment that showed what those cuts of a trillion dollars would do--let alone 9 trillion--and it would, basically, wipe out five major programs and cut another five major programs in half at the end of this year. So that vision of massive cuts to programs families depend on is right at the heart of this budget resolution.

And this really is the great betrayal because Candidate Trump campaigned on the vision of helping families. But now that he is in office, he is reverting to the same plan he had in the last year of his first administration, which is slashing programs for families and giving massive tax cuts to megamillionaires and billionaires. We have seen this movie before, and the movie's director is a man named Russell Vought. He was head of OMB in the Trump administration the first time around. And who has Trump nominated to put in place of the Director of OMB and now been confirmed by the Senate? The same man, Russell Vought.

And do we see the architecture of this plan anywhere else? Well, yes, we do. It is called Project 2025--that plan that President Trump said he didn't know anything about. But it was his Director of OMB who was the architect of the plan, and it is that plan that is being implemented right now. And what is that plan? That plan is the great betrayal: slash the programs for families, give tax giveaways to the richest Americans.

Now, in the Budget Committee, we had a chance to examine this plan and propose amendments to it. We proposed 44 amendments, and all of them were voted down on a party line. So that was quite disappointing because, really, what we were about was to say, Hey, to our Republican colleagues, if you want to protect families and this program isn't really about slashing programs for families, then vote with us to protect those programs.

Well, so we put up amendment after amendment to protect those programs. One was about the cost of groceries. Democrats said: Don't allow provisions into this bill that are going to drive up the cost of groceries. Democrats voted for protection; Republicans voted it down.

Democrats said: Don't put provisions into this bill that are going to cut Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security or, in any other way, make healthcare more expensive. Democrats voted for that protection. Republicans rejected it.

Democrats put forward an amendment for provisions that would--against provisions that would raise the cost of rent or raise the cost of buying a home. Republicans on the committee rejected it.

Democrats put forward an amendment to protect or hopefully lower the cost of drugs, and Republicans rejected it.

Democrats put forward an amendment that said: Don't make changes in the law when this bill comes back that will increase the cost of going to college. Republicans rejected it.

Protecting the National School Lunch Program? Republicans rejected it.

Protecting families against an increase in childcare? Republicans rejected it.

Protecting the investment in research for cancer, Alzheimer's, and other lifesaving major medical measures? Protect the funding for that? Republicans rejected it.

Now, if this bill wasn't about slashing all those programs, why would Republicans vote against all those things? If they actually wanted to protect families--the programs that provide the foundation for families to be on their feet, to thrive, to move in the middle class, to prosper--why would they vote to open the door to slashing all those programs?

Then we see that they are racing their House counterparts. At 10 a.m. last week, when we considered in committee the Republican Senate budget resolution, the House proceeded to put forward--they are just down the hallway through this door over here--the House--at the end of the hallway--put forward their own budget resolution, which is very, very similar except in magnitude. The House bill provides even more tax cuts for the richest Americans than does the Senate bill. So the stakes couldn't be higher.

Where are we headed? Are we headed towards a bill this year that is going to make the rich richer, increase income inequality, proceed to help the wealthy run this country by and for the powerful and undermine the vision of government by and for the people? That is exactly where the Republican budget resolution is headed.

If you kind of want to make sure that you really understand how true this is, think about the fact that the last budget presented by President Trump in his first term, his first 4 years, which was written by his current OMB Director, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought--that had exactly the same architecture. It proposed slashing $1 trillion over a decade from programs for families. It slashed healthcare and housing for seniors and veterans, slashed funding for hospitals and community health centers, slashed school meal programs and food pantries, slashed Head Start and police and firefighting grants, slashed tax relief for families and veterans and retirement--$1 trillion in the last budget.

But that was $1 trillion over 10 years. What Republicans are now proposing is $1 trillion over 1 year--just 1 year. It is only actually half a year. There are only 6 months left in fiscal year 2025.

When President Trump ran, when he was Candidate Trump, he talked about reducing the costs for families, but everything he is doing now is sending costs upwards. It is Trumpflation. Trumpflation has arrived in the United States of America. Instead of slashing the price of groceries, he is proposing programs that will drive up costs for hard- working families. That is Trumpflation.

This budget resolution opens the door to making healthcare more expensive for families--not cheaper, more expensive. That is Trumpflation.

This budget opens the door to making college more expensive by changing how college loans are administered. That is Trumpflation.

This budget opens the door to unleashing carbon dioxide and methane pollution that drive climate chaos, that will drive up the cost of flood and fire insurance across America. In the West, it is fire insurance. In the gulf in Florida, the Southern States, it is flood insurance. That is Trumpflation.

This budget opens the door to increasing the cost of childcare-- something working families really struggle with. It is Trumpflation.

It opens the door to increasing the cost of prescription drugs. Trumpflation has arrived.

In each of these areas, we said: Don't do it. We said: Don't proceed to put into this budget resolution opening these doors to these assaults on American families. Democrats said it in every way we could, and Republicans said: No. We want to cut those programs. We are not closing those doors.

I know American families don't agree with this vision. My office--the office of every Senator here, every Senator represented by their desk in this room--every office is receiving thousands of phone calls. I had a couple of days last week that I got over 2,000 phone calls from Oregon. That is an incredible number. And we had so many members of the team working, trying to answer every call live, but we couldn't keep up. Even though my team has a highly coordinated ability to expand the number of people answering the phone, we couldn't keep up because people are so disturbed about this vision for America, this vision of attacking families and gold-plating billionaires. That is not an American vision, but it is the vision of President Trump.

Then we have the second piece--the tax giveaways. The Senate budget resolution proposes $3.7 trillion in tax giveaways. The megamillionaires and billionaires get most of that, just like in the first Trump tax cut proposal, tax giveaway proposal. It was something like 80 percent that went to the top 10 percent in America.

Well, I know that Elon Musk doesn't need more of our Treasury money.

Mr. President, my colleague from Connecticut is here past midnight. Why is he here past midnight? Because the health and welfare of our children and our families are at stake. That is why I am here, too--because it matters. It matters that you have someone in charge of Health and Human Services who has some at least basic understanding of the issues and basic experience managing a Department or managing an organization. But the candidate, the nominee, RFK, Jr., fails--fails on experience, fails on ethics, fails on qualifications. I must say the diagnosis is grim in each of these three areas.

Let's talk a little about his experience running an agency or his medical experience. In fact, when Mr. Kennedy was asked during his confirmation hearings about some of the Agencies he would oversee, he got his facts completely wrong about just the core basics--about Medicare, a critical healthcare program for seniors throughout our Nation.

It has these parts--A, B, and C--and people in the medical world all know every detail about this. When he was asked about it, he kind of just guessed, and he said: Well, Part A covers primary care, Part B covers physicians, and Part C is a full menu of healthcare services.

Well, not even close--not even close. Part A covers inpatient hospital services; part B, outpatient and home health services; and Part C, Medicare Advantage. I don't know if he could have explained what Medicare Advantage is.

Everyone who works in the field of providing healthcare through Medicare understands these core, basic foundations, as well as lots of other details.

Senator Cassidy talked about another piece of the healthcare puzzle. We have Medicare. We also have Medicaid. Medicaid in Oregon is the Oregon Health Plan. It provides healthcare to families who are struggling, who are not yet fully into the middle class.

He said that all of Medicaid is fully paid by the Federal Government. No. No, it is not. In fact, in Oregon, the State picks up two-fifths of the tab, and there are different categories and different ratios.

Maybe one could say that these details--one doesn't need to know every aspect of it, but the architecture of our healthcare system, the basic architecture, just the simplest, most fundamental pieces, he has no idea about.

These are incredibly important programs in our States, Medicare and Medicaid. Forty-four percent of the births in Oregon are covered by Medicaid.

You know, Oregon is a very rural State. We have some big cities, but we have a lot of rural areas. Medicaid coverage rates are higher in rural areas because incomes are lower and more people qualify.

Medicaid is incredibly important in the counties that are very rural in my State. In my 36 counties, a good two-thirds of them or three- fourths of them would be considered extremely rural.

It is important to people in rural America that you have a leader who understands and cares about the healthcare program for rural America, but that individual is not RFK, Jr.

Not only that, it is vital that the Health and Human Services Secretary understands which ideas don't work.

Once again, our Republican colleagues are pushing to impose work requirements on Medicaid enrollees. Now, every developed country but the United States fully backs the idea that healthcare is a right. It is not a privilege that comes out of your wealth. They understand that in order to be able to work, you have to have healthcare so you can be well enough to work. That is every other country. But here, the elite across the aisle only want healthcare for the rich. They want to cut down Medicaid. They want poor people to struggle and never be able to get wealth so they can never get a job so they can keep talking about how lazy people are. Well, that is just absurd and wrong in every possible way.

Ninety-one percent of Medicaid enrollees who aren't disabled are either employed, in school, or caring for family members. Yet, every few years, my colleagues across the aisle trot out this myth, and every few years, it gets debunked, and then they bring it back. Just in a cycle, like sunspots or something, it comes around every few years.

We actually have facts on what has happened when this misbegotten idea is undertaken.

In 2018, when Arkansas implemented new work requirements during the first Trump administration, to maintain their health insurance, Arkansas Medicaid enrollees had to fill out a mountain of paperwork every month. Many of these folks worked part time. Many worked hourly jobs. Some worked several jobs to make ends meet. Not surprisingly, it is very hard, when you are struggling with making multiple jobs fit, to have the time to do massive paperwork all the time. They are working their jobs, and they are taking care of their families.

So what happened? Other Medicaid enrollees were working but could not reliably meet the required number of hours given the normal fluctuations of low-wage and hourly work. If you ever, ever have lived in a blue-collar community--and I live in a blue-collar community-- people who are patching together various part-time jobs--the managers change the schedules continuously. So now your schedule for one job conflicts with the schedule for the other job.

Anyway, it is very stressful and it is very challenging to be getting minimum wage or near minimum wage and conflicting schedules and managers changing those schedules and still trying to deal with raising kids and being there when you need to be there.

Roughly 18,000 people lost health insurance in Arkansas before a Federal judge halted the new work requirements for violating the intended purpose of the Medicaid Program.

Well, there was another State that tried this out--Georgia. They implemented work requirements in 2023. Not wanting their work requirements to be struck down by the courts, Georgia lawmakers lowered the requirements for Medicaid enrollment, thereby technically expanding coverage to fulfill the purpose of the program.

In doing so, the State of Georgia estimated that another 175,000 people would enroll in the program. They estimated 175,000, and only 6,500 people enrolled. The State of Georgia spent $60 million in administrative fees tracking compliance with the work requirements--$60 million; 6,500 people; $10,000 for a Medicaid enrollee in Georgia just on administrative overhead, not providing healthcare. The costs just kept piling up.

Uninsured people still need to see a doctor, but instead of seeing their doctor and getting care early, uninsured people wait to get care until they wind up in the emergency rooms.

There is an old but accurate saying: ``An uninsured patient is the most expensive patient.'' So anyone with half a brain would want people to be insured. They will get care earlier. They don't end up in the emergency room. It will save money. People are healthier. They are more likely to work. And it costs less. It is a win-win on every level.

Well, if you strike down the support for Medicaid here, States have to figure out if they can pick up the difference. Picking up the difference means they have to wrestle with whether to raise taxes.

Why do my colleagues across the aisle in other States have to raise taxes to provide basic healthcare?

Oh, my goodness, yeah, impose that burden on families trying to get on their feet and be able to thrive.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, every Medicaid dollar spent today reduces future deficits by $2. That is a pretty good return. That is an investment we can't afford not to make. And the loss of Medicaid coverage hits rural communities particularly hard.

As I have noted, most of my home State is rural. A couple of weeks ago,

we saw what happened when Medicaid funding was frozen after Donald Trump's dead-of-night directive to cut off funding for programs that families depended on. Critical access hospitals, rural clinics, federally qualified health centers were terrified that they would have to lay off staff or shut their doors. Any loss of Medicaid funding for these communities would threaten what are often the only hospitals or clinics in these rural areas. They are always struggling.

But when Medicaid was expanded, when Oregon seized that opportunity, a lot of patients who were never able to pay a bill could now pay the bill because they had insurance, and that meant a much stronger foundation for rural healthcare. Don't we want a stronger foundation for rural healthcare?

It is critical to have a Secretary for Health and Human Services who understands these issues, and that individual is not RFK, Jr.

He is, however, something else: one of the world's best-known purveyors of conspiracy theories about the alleged harm that comes from effective vaccines. That is, he is a conspiracy theorist who says these effective vaccines that everyone else knows are effective, he is going to tell you something different. He is going to tell you that HPV and measles and tetanus and flu and polio and chickenpox vaccines don't work.

His conspiracy theories have been debunked time and time again. They have been repudiated time and time again, including the big one--and that is that vaccines cause autism. This is a straightforward thing that has been studied time and time and time again. And it is a powerful conspiracy theory if you happen to have a child who has autism and if it starts appearing about the same time that you are giving a lot of childhood vaccines. You could believe that maybe that is the cause. So it has been studied time and time again in children who have vaccines, who don't have vaccines. The vaccines do not cause autism.

And yet, what has he done? He says: I believe autism comes from vaccines.

In the middle of a 2017 measles outbreak in Minnesota's Somali- American community, he falsely told parents the following:

Africans and African Americans may be particularly

vulnerable to vaccine injuries including autism.

He also falsely claimed that the global decline in measles was caused by ``nutrition and clean water,'' not the measles vaccine, and that children in California were getting measles ``from the vaccine or . . . from somebody who got the vaccine.''

In other words, he stood it on its head and said those who are getting sick--who are getting sick because they did not have the vaccine--were getting sick because they had the vaccine.

All of this misinformation does real harm.

He even raised doubt over flu shots, claiming that ``there is zero evidence that the flu shot prevents any hospitalizations or any deaths.'' This is completely untrue. This is wrong. A lot of people in America die every year from the flu, so this has been extensively studied.

Now, I didn't get flu shots until the COVID epidemic came and my wife, who was a nurse, said: While you are getting that COVID shot, get your flu shot. I had never gotten a flu shot before. I never worried about it. I didn't think about it. It never occurred to me. Lots of people didn't. So it was very easy to study those who get flu shots and those who don't.

And what RFK, Jr., did was not be honest with people--in fact, to tell people information he undoubtedly knew was untrue. And the result is more people get sick, more people die.

Finally, Kennedy also referred to the COVID vaccine as ``the deadliest vaccine ever made.'' Well, we know how many people were dying before we had the COVID vaccine, and we now know how much safer things are. We are not sitting here on the floor tonight with a mask over our face. Our accompanying staff do not have masks over their face. The folks in the elevator today didn't have a mask because the threat of COVID has receded because we have a COVID vaccine.

This misinformation isn't just some harmless fun. These conspiracy theories are not some harmless fun. They do real harm. They do real harm.

I want to read to you a letter from Josh Green. He is the current Governor of Hawaii, and he is a physician. He wrote the following. I am going to quote it extensively:

Mr. Kennedy has spent years undermining one of the greatest

public health achievements in history: vaccines. His rhetoric

directly contributed to the tragic 2019 measles epidemic in

Samoa, which infected thousands and killed 83 people,

primarily children.

He goes on to say--the Governor of Hawaii, current Governor, a physician:

I witnessed this personally. As Hawaii's Lieutenant

Governor at the time--

This is the Governor now--

and a practicing physician at the time, I led an emergency

medical team to Samoa to administer life-saving vaccinations

after misinformation--much of it spread by Mr. Kennedy and

his network--led to a collapse in immunization rates.

We saw firsthand the devastating consequences: grieving

parents, overwhelmed hospitals, and a nation in crisis.

The impact of Mr. Kennedy's reckless actions extends beyond

Samoa. He has spread vaccine misinformation globally, leading

to preventable disease outbreaks that have infected countless

people.

That is the letter from the Governor of Hawaii, also a physician, who went on an emergency medical trip to Samoa and witnessed firsthand people--children--dying because of the lies from RFK, Jr.

That is not a person you bring in to lead your healthcare system, and every one of my colleagues across the aisle knows it. They know they are hurting people by putting him into this office.

So I ask them: Rethink your responsibility to serve the people of the United States. That is your responsibility as a Member of this U.S. Senate. You have constituents in your home State. The President is not your constituent. The President has platinum-plated healthcare. We are not worried about the President getting the best healthcare. We are concerned about our constituents.

I could tell you a lot more because I have a lot of information here. My colleague from California is here, and I am looking in his direction to see if he is ready to speak. If he is, I am going to wrap up.

I am particularly struck by the letter written to us by Caroline Kennedy, first cousin to RFK, Jr. I will just summarize it and say, it is not complimentary. She says in the most dramatic terms that we are making a massive mistake to put him in charge; that he has served his wallet, he has served without ethics, he has served in a way that has hurt people time and time again, and he does not belong in office.

Mr. President, we are here, as my colleague was before me, Chris Murphy from Connecticut, as my colleague from California is now--we are all here after midnight. We are here after midnight because this matters, because more people will suffer and die across this country, more children will die because of the incompetence and the full lack of ethics of the individual being considered to head up our healthcare system.

Let's not make this mistake when we vote on his final nomination.

Mr. President, our constituents, our country, and our Constitution are under attack by Donald Trump and Russell Vought.

Democrats are fighting back. Russell Vought--also pronounced ``vote''--is the mastermind of Project 2025 and of all of the chaos and the lawlessness that Trump has unleashed across our country.

Today, my Republican colleagues are trying to jam through the confirmation of this man, Russell Vought, and it is our job to say ``stop'' because this man is incredibly dangerous to the foundations of our Republic, the system of laws and checks and balances of our Constitution. When you put into the Office of Management and Budget an individual who willfully avoids and rolls over the laws of the country and says he will not abide by the separation of powers, that is a fundamental danger that all of us, having taken an oath to the Constitution, must stop.

He is Donald Trump's most dangerous nominee. Oh, you may not have heard of him as much as you have heard of the nominee for the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Hegseth. You may not have heard about him in the same way you have heard about Tulsi Gabbard, who went to Syria without the permission of the State Department to consult with a dictator. But this man, who is the chief engineer--the chief engineer--of the Trump train--a train that plans to disregard the law and the Constitution--is a bigger danger to our Republic. That is why Democrats are taking the floor now and will continue to hold the floor over every minute allowed under our rules to say: This is a mistake.

To colleagues across the aisle, you, too, took an oath to the Constitution. You have a responsibility to defend it, and the only way to defend it at the end of this 30 hours is to vote no on Russell Vought.

The American people are watching us today, and I know they are feeling rage about what Trump and Vought are doing. I know this because, this last weekend, I had five townhalls in Oregon, and we had three to eight times the number of people turn out who turned out a year ago, which was an election year, which has a bigger turnout than a normal year.

They wondered: How is it possible to break the law in firing inspectors general? How is it possible to break the law in firing a member of the National Labor Relations Board in the middle of an 8-year term when the law doesn't allow you to do that? How is it possible

to break the law and proceed to dismantle USAID when the law doesn't allow you to dismantle an organization?

Yes, the President can ask Congress to write a new law, but to do it through Executive fiat? No, the Constitution does not allow that.

The impoundment of funds people asked about. It has been very clear since the time of Nixon--when Nixon impounded funds, Congress then stood together and said, ``Hell no, you cannot do that,'' and the courts said, ``Hell no, you cannot do that,'' and then Nixon followed the issue as the courts decided.

But Mr. Russell Vought--or ``vote''--he doesn't care, he said. He says: The President doesn't agree that this should be the interpretation of the Constitution, and I don't agree. So we are just going to impound funds as we want.

That is a dangerous man to our Republic. So I encourage citizens across this country: It is your opportunity to be heard as you were this weekend at my townhalls. Take to the streets. Take to the phones. Let your message amplify and ring from the eastern coast to the western coast and the southern border to the northern border with Canada. Let your message ring that true patriots will stand with the Constitution of the United States of America, that true patriots will defend the separation of powers, that true patriots will defend the checks and balances inherent in our Constitution.

Well, just know we stand with you, America, and we are fighting back from the outside and the inside--patriots, together, patriots united-- in defending our Constitution against this sweeping, authoritarian coup. That is what we are doing.

Now, I know you hear the word ``coup,'' and you think: Isn't it a coup when the military comes in and takes over in violation of the Constitution?

There is also a quieter kind of coup. When the President refuses to follow the laws of the Constitution, that is a coup as well, and that is what we are facing now. That is why every Member of this body should be standing up to say no to the architect of this coup--Russell Vought.

What we have now in President Trump is government by billionaires for billionaires. Our fight is to say that that is not the vision of our Constitution. Our vision of the Constitution is of a ``we the people'' Constitution or, as Abraham Lincoln said, ``a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' That is a very different vision-- the vision embedded in our Constitution--than the vision being pursued by the President at this moment.

So you will hear from many Members of the Democratic caucus over the next 30 hours, and we ask of our colleagues: Listen to what is said. Don't mindlessly follow the dictates of an authoritarian President who is trying to violate the Constitution, because that is not your responsibility, and recognize that what he is doing is trying to take away the legislative power of the House and Senate and replace it with Executive fiats.

Wasn't it strange to listen to an inaugural speech in which President Trump didn't talk about legislative initiatives? It was just one Executive order after the other. The message was clear. He was telling America: I am not going to be a President who executes the laws; I am going to be a President who overrides the laws with Executive orders.

Just within hours--mere hours--of taking the oath to the Constitution, he put forward an Executive order that violated the 14th Amendment on birthright citizenship. Just days after taking the oath to the Constitution, he put forward a strategy of impoundment that violates the core of the Constitution, where the power of the purse is given to Congress, not to the President.

So here we are, going forward. We are in dangerous times for our Nation. We are in the midst of this unfolding authoritarian coup, and we have the responsibility to stop it.

Now, it is hard to focus on any one thing. The expression I have heard almost hourly is the President is ``flooding the zone,'' meaning he is doing so many things at once and so many Executive orders that it just creates, well, confusion and chaos, and it makes it hard to focus on any one action that is so diabolical that normally all of us would be focused on it and saying: No.

So this strategy is an effective one, but that is why we are taking the next 30 hours to not focus on 100 things but 1 thing: the danger Russell Vought presents to our Constitution and our responsibility--our responsibility--in advice and consent under the Constitution to vet that candidate, realize who he is, and say he is not fit to be the Director of OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. In fact, he is not fit to serve in any governmental capacity.

It was quite troubling to experience Donald Trump's dead-of-night directive a week ago Monday night to cut off funding for programs that families depend on--programs to feed children, programs to pay rent, programs to see the doctor--cutoffs that are cruel and indiscriminate and illegal because the President has the responsibility to execute the laws, not ignore them or violate them.

We saw so much happen in terms of disrespecting or breaking the law.

The inspectors general--17 and counting--are the watchdogs who say to the executive branch: You must obey the law. So, if you want to see what an authoritarian President does who is seeking an imperial Presidency where he can write the laws through fiat, one of the first things you do is tear down the watchdogs, and that is what he did. The watchdog for the Department of Labor, the watchdog for the Interior, the watchdog for Housing and Urban Development, the watchdog for the Defense Department, the watchdog for the State Department, the watchdog for Agriculture, the watchdog for Health and Human Services, the watchdog for the Department of Education--all fired in violation of the law.

The law does give the President the ability to dismiss an inspector general under two conditions. The first condition--30-days' notice. The second condition is that it be for cause. Both were broken.

Why is no Member of the President's party standing up on the floor of the Senate and saying, ``Respect the law, Mr. President''?

That is an obligation we all share. It isn't the responsibility of the minority party to say ``defend the Constitution'' alone; it is the responsibility of the majority party as well, of every individual Member here in the Senate.

Then we had the President fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board, but the law says you can't do that. They have a term. You get to put in and nominate a new person at the end of the term. But he was fired anyway. Why? Because it is part of the attack on families and the ability to enforce labor protections this President opposes.

He wants to give free rein to corporations to run over labor provisions embedded in the law. If there is no one to appeal to, then there is no constraint on the abuses put onto working people. That is what we are facing.

The President fired the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I can tell you, protection of consumers from terrible financial products is incredibly important.

You know, when I was elected to the Senate, we had two types of loans that were predatory mortgage loans that were turning the dream of home ownership into a nightmare.

One was called the triple option loan. What that meant was that you could pay a smaller amount, and the amount you owed on your house would actually escalate over time. Then when you got to a certain point of escalation, then the loan would switch, and you would have to pay a different amount that many people couldn't afford. So it resulted in a lot of foreclosures.

Then we had another type of home mortgage with an exploding interest rate. You would get a subsidized interest rate for a couple of years, and then the interest rate explodes to 9 or 10 percent. People couldn't make those payments.

They had been steered into those loans by mortgage brokers who were getting kickbacks undisclosed to the person taking out the loan. They were being betrayed by kickbacks called steering payments.

That is the type of thing that hurt America terribly because the foreclosures then were a key factor driving the collapse of the economy in 2007, 2008, into 2009. Hundreds of thousands,

millions of homes were foreclosed on, all because there wasn't a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to say those loans were not OK.

I was very pleased to lead the charge in Dodd-Frank to end those predatory loans. But for ongoing protection against scurrilous, scandalous scams, you need a watchdog for the consumer. The President, favoring billionaires and corporations over the American workers, proceeded to fire the watchdog that protects us against scandalous scams in financial products.

Then the President fired members of the FBI, experts who were focused on making sure the executive branch stays within the confines of the law. Well, if you don't want the FBI checking out the fact that you are breaking the law, you fire them so there is no one there to hold you accountable or do a report.

These are the acts of a President determined to rule by fiat and break the laws and break the Constitution.

Then Donald Trump gave Elon Musk unprecedented and unacceptable access to the U.S. Treasury's most sensitive payment systems. Those payment systems control over $5 trillion a year in payments. Those payment systems have everyone's private information.

Do you like the fact that Elon Musk and his team of muskrats, with their laptops, has been in there downloading information on you? Don't you kind of worry about the type of Big Brother government that downloads your private information and sends in inexperienced people to take over the payments and take your private information: where you live, how much you earn, your tax returns, whether you get Medicare, whether you get Social Security, your Social Security number-- everything within that world. That is a massive assault on the privacy of American citizens by a Big Brother government--the type of government that wants to be an authoritarian Presidency and control everything and have power over everything, and so they invade the Treasury and the system of payments.

Not only is it a huge risk to the privacy of Americans across this land, but it also is an invitation to exploitation. It is an invitation to extortion because now Big Brother government, in the form of Mr. Trump and Elon Musk and his muskrats, has your information that they can use against you should they so please.

Finally, there is the danger that this crew that invaded Treasury alters the codes and screws up the payments. Maybe they don't intend to, but they do because they don't know what they are doing. They are not experts on the code. Then suddenly the Medicare or Social Security payments or tax returns don't go out the way they are supposed to.

A whole lot of Americans aren't like billionaire Trump and his band of billionaire bros. They are living paycheck to paycheck. So screwing up a single payment can put a family in a world of hurt, including missing a rent payment that gets them thrown out of their house.

That is not the only way that Team Trump is attacking ordinary families. There is also the big sales tax he wants to impose across the Nation in the form of tariffs.

Mr. Trump says: Huh, it will be the Ford companies that pay for tariffs.

Well, just factually, that is wrong. The importer pays the tariff bill, not the group that exports to the United States. The American company that imports pays the tariff. Then, in order to pay the tariff, they raise their prices. So it becomes a sales tax on the American people. So a 25-percent tariff on Mexico or Canada becomes a 25-percent tax more or less on working America.

You know, President Trump posted on Truth Social that tariffs should never have been ended in favor of the income tax system. Just recognize this: Tariffs that result in higher prices on Americans are incredibly regressive. They have a much bigger impact on those who are less well off who have to buy food and groceries. Unlike a sales tax that has an exemption for healthcare or food or groceries, there is no exemption from the higher prices driven by a tariff. So they are incredibly regressive. The tariffs are a strategy to attack working families across this land.

Trump was very clear. He said basically we should go back to the old system of funding our government by tariffs, the system we had before 1913, when America ratified the 16th Amendment and allowed the income tax. In other words, he wants to go from a tax system on income that can, if implemented carefully--and often it is not, and it has way too many loopholes--it can be progressive; that is, the rich who can afford to pay more can pay a higher percent.

But the tariffs converted into a sales tax on Americans--that is, in fact, incredibly regressive, hurting the poor. It is why rich folks always want to have a sales tax replace an income tax, because they know they pay less. The rich pay less, and the working stiffs have to pay more because their paycheck has to go directly to consumption because that is what they have, paycheck to paycheck. They have got to pay the rent, got to pay for food, got to pay the utility bill. But the well off are taking their extra funds and they are investing. So they don't have to spend every dime on consumption. That is the mechanics of how a tariff becomes a regressive sales tax.

Let's be crystal clear about what is happening. There is a three-part plan in Project 2025--again, the architect of which is up for confirmation right now--on the question of advice and consent by the Senate. So the architect of Project 2025 has a three-step plan.

Attack working families--that is step 1. That is what happens when you cut the programs for healthcare and housing and education and children--you attack the families. Step 2, borrow trillions from the Treasury and run up the debt, currently estimated to be in the area of about $3 trillion. Then take and deliver a massive tax giveaway to the billionaires. That is the plan: Attack families, borrow trillions, and give away trillions to the billionaires.

In fact, the current estimate for the amount given to the trillionaires is around $4.6 trillion--or to the billionaires or mega millionaires, the richest Americans--$4.6 trillion.

Kind of ironic, isn't it, that a President who campaigned on helping families is actually driving a plan, in partnership with Russell Vought, to attack families and deliver for the billionaires? Campaign on government for families, get elected, and immediately pivot to attacking families and delivering for billionaires--that is what we are facing.

This is the great betrayal, a betrayal of all the voters who believed Donald Trump when he said ``I am for you,'' who believed him when he said he wants to protect and help working families, and yet he attacks the ability of workers to organize and get a fair day's pay for an honest day's work. That is the great betrayal.

The architect of this is up for confirmation right now. The architect for this is advocating for the President to violate the laws and has already demonstrated that these last 2 weeks. The architect of this is arguing that we cut programs, run up the debt, and give it all to the richest Americans. That is the plan.

So over the next 30 hours, Democrats are coming to the floor united, determined to stand with the families of the United States of America. Mr. Trump is standing with the billionaires.

My colleagues who have indicated they want to confirm Russell Vought, confirm the architect of Project 2025, confirm the person who inspired the attacks on family programs a week ago Monday night--they are standing with the billionaires.

I invite them, come join us. Do not stand for government by and for billionaires. Come join us and fight for families. Come join us and honor the responsibility of the executive branch to obey the laws. Come join us and protect the constitutional separation of powers.

After all, the President's effort to move the power of the purse from Congress--the power of Congress is to say: Here are the instructions. We want you to fund this program and this program and this program. The President wants to say: It doesn't matter; those are just suggestions.

I have news for you: Read the Constitution. The President is not a king, and a law is not a suggestion.

So come join us united in support of the law and the Constitution.

Russell Vought is a leading proponent of the impoundment theory

that says a President can decide how much to spend on programs that Congress has written into the law; in other words, that the appropriations bills are simply suggestions, not the law.

No. We had this conversation back in the Nixon era. Remember President Nixon, along with Watergate? Remember that other unconstitutional thing he did? That was to say: I as President can stop the funding of programs that the law says I am supposed to fund. Well, the Court said otherwise. It said, in fact: No way. That is unconstitutional.

Then in 1974, in the Budget and Impoundment Control Act, Congress said: Hey, Mr. President, we will give you a mechanism by which you can present the idea of changing current law. You don't think we need to spend money on, say, that weapon program because the technology is outdated or maybe you don't need to spend money on some feeding program because it is duplicative of another feeding program or food program or you don't need to spend money on X, Y, or Z. Maybe a nuclear warhead was being rebuilt to be on a certain missile, but we are not building the missile anymore.

So the President could proceed to say: Here is a letter that comes to Congress saying: I know these are in the law. I know I have to fund them. But we shouldn't fund them, so, please, over the next 45 days, debate and vote on changing the current law so that we save this money.

It is called a rescission. It is in the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act. We gave the President a tool by which he could follow the Constitution and ask for reductions in programs already passed into law.

Now, I am quite sure that not a single Senator here, not a single Senator wandering around the Capitol somewhere, has received a rescission letter from President Trump or one on behalf of President Trump from the Office of Management and Budget.

If you want to cut programs that are already in the law, there is a mechanism to do it lawfully. You ask Congress to do so in a letter for a rescission. It is a fancy word. We don't talk about it much. Presidents don't very often ask us to undo programs we have just passed because we budget on an annual basis; we pass those laws on an annual basis. So they are rarely so out of date that a President says: OK, undo that program. But they have the power to do so because we gave the President the ability to ask in the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act.

And by the way, the lower court rescissions that preceded that 1974 law, those were then reviewed and made it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, absolutely, the President cannot impound funds. It is a violation of the Constitution.

So to my colleagues, if you are saying: I don't know if Senator Merkley from Oregon is right about this, read the Supreme Court case. And you have a responsibility to defend the Constitution, and that is why you have a responsibility to vote no on Russell Vought, who wants to violate the Constitution.

Another piece that I am concerned about with Mr. Vought is that he didn't wait to be confirmed to start being, essentially, the shadow director of the Office of Management and Budget. I can't count how many nominees have come through and said: Well, actually, I can't go near that office until I am confirmed because that would be a violation of the intent of the Constitution that people have to be confirmed before they take a role.

But what did we hear from the White House after all these illegal Executive orders were put out? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: Russell Vought told me to tell all of you the line to his office is open.

So here is Mr. Vought basically saying: I am really the power already at OMB. My line is open; call me.

Well, Mr. Vought, if you would quit breaking the law and advocating for breaking the law, you would know you shouldn't be in the Office of Management and Budget essentially acting as if you have been confirmed when you haven't been confirmed yet.

Again, it is a confirmation of the inclination of this individual to say: The laws don't matter; I will do what I want no matter how much damage it does to the law or the Constitution.

So we did send a letter to Mr. Vought saying: Are you on the payroll currently? Do you have a title? Have you been hired as a senior assistant? Is that legal given you are up for nomination to run the place? Is it legal for you to be hired as an adviser and then act as if you are running the place? Is that legal?

We didn't get any answers.

Another reason to vote no: The file is not complete. He hasn't answered. Why does he not want to answer? Because you wouldn't like the answer. The American people wouldn't like the answer that he is over there running OMB at a time he hasn't even been confirmed by the Senate. So he doesn't answer. That, too, should bother colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

Because we didn't have answers, the Democrats on the Budget Committee wrote to the chair of the Budget Committee and said: Delay this vote. Delay it for 2 weeks so we can get answers to questions and get a complete file.

Well, that is a reasonable request in this situation because both sides of the aisle have often worked together to say nominees have to complete their paperwork, they have to answer the questions raised by the committee. But we were told: No. This position is so urgent. The President so desperately needs the architect of Project 2025 to be the engineer on the train that we can't actually wait and get answers and have the file completed.

I certainly disagree with that answer. I think it disrespects the entire membership of the Budget Committee.

And then, the vote in committee was scheduled without the file complete, and it was scheduled to be done in a little room off the floor over here where the public cannot attend and where members would not be allowed to talk to each other and share their observations or concerns, which basically violates the whole premise of members on a committee sharing their observations to try to get to a better answer.

Now, I was told that, as the ranking Democrat, I can make a few comments, but the rest of my committee--other Democrats or even the other members of the Republican side--were told they couldn't make any comments or attempt to influence each other. So we said: No, that is not right. This is such an important nomination and his background is so troubling and his current actions are so troubling, hold that conversation about the vote in a public forum.

Just that morning, we had held just such a public conversation on the Ambassador to the United Nations in the Foreign Relations room. Each member was asked: Do you want to add anything as we consider whether or not to send this nomination to the floor?

Well, the Ambassador to the United Nations is a pretty important role. But, you know, the chief engineer of the Office of Management and Budget, the architect of this entire strategy that Trump has laid out, that is very important as well. So we asked for a public hearing or discussion so that members could talk to each other, share their concerns, maybe persuade each other--though not often enough do we listen to each other--and the result was, from the chair of the Budget Committee: No, we are not holding a public dialogue about whether people think he should be confirmed.

So the vote was held in a tiny room. I think one reporter was allowed in. No public was allowed in, no expanded press corps, no dialogue between the members. We asked a reasonable request that this be done publicly, and that was denied.

I am sorry to the American public that you were excluded because you would have heard then what you are hearing from me now and what you will hear from Members of the Democrats over the next 30 hours: how fabulously unfit this individual is to serve in any government role.

So we are here tonight, on through now, through the night, into the morning--we are here for the next 30 hours to raise the alarm about how dangerously unfit this nominee is to serve in the role of chief engineer because he doesn't respect the law, he doesn't respect the Constitution. He has already demonstrated that by stepping into the role and coordinating the dark-of-night decisions to cut programs to working families all across this land.

Now, I would say: Hmm, but does he really believe in this whole impoundment thing? Is he really an advocate of breaking the law? Well, we saw it Monday night, but we also saw it during

the first Trump administration when Russell Vought was the architect of impoundment of the funds destined by law to go to Ukraine. So this isn't some empty theory. It is already in the historical record. Russell Vought coordinated a strategy of refusing to send the funds required by law to go to Ukraine.

Now, there was another element of this, which was President Trump, during his first term, was trying to use those funds and the impoundment of those funds to get the President of Ukraine to say bad things about a member of the Biden family. That combination of impoundment, which was illegal, and then essentially using that to extort a statement from the President of Ukraine--which the President of Ukraine refused to do--led to Trump's first impeachment trial.

So Russell Vought's illegal, unconstitutional strategy of impoundment and using it as a tool of extortion to try to attack a political opponent led to Trump's first impeachment and first trial here in the Senate. So have no doubt that the man who advocated for impoundment and the extortion of a statement from the President of Ukraine back in the first Trump administration is certainly very honest when he says he is still for impoundment right now.

That is the one thing I will say. He didn't try to disguise this fact. He said: The President doesn't like what the Supreme Court decided on the Constitution. I don't like it. So we are going to ignore it.

He ignored it before. He intends to ignore it again.

I will tell you something else that I think is deeply disturbing, and that is Russell Vought's absolute disdain for the nonpartisan professionals who work for the American people as civil servants. He wants to take folks who are members of the civil service and make them at-will employees of the President so the President can sweep out of position tens of thousands--fire tens of thousands of servants to the American people who use their professional skills to deliver services as efficiently and as effectively as possible and replace them with loyalist lackeys.

I don't want a loyalist lackey in the control tower deciding when planes land. I want a nonpartisan professional.

I don't want a loyalist lackey having access to the Treasury payment system and trying to use that to extort favors from people around the country or disclosing the private information of individuals or actually screwing up the computer code and causing payments not to be delivered effectively. I want a nonpartisan professional.

I don't want a loyalist lackey deciding on how to transport vaccines across the country, who doesn't know a damn thing about whether they have to be refrigerated or not or how long they can sit on the shelf or how to get them effectively delivered. I want a nonpartisan professional.

But not Russell Vought. In fact, Russell Vought called for Federal workers to be traumatized so that they would consider themselves to be villains and would leave public service and could be replaced by loyalist lackeys. That should concern everyone.

And, listen, I understand the pressure my colleagues are under. We all become, as part of our party, essentially part of a team, and the inclination is to support the member of your team who is now President. But there is a higher responsibility here. It is a responsibility to the law, and it is a responsibility to the Constitution that you took an oath to.

And, certainly, supporting the firing of tens of thousands of nonpartisan professionals and replacing them with loyalist lackeys is a huge disservice to the families of America who depend upon all of those core programs in healthcare, housing, education, programs for children, standing on their feet so they can thrive and move into the middle class. It is part of the attack on families embedded in Trump and Russell Vought's Project 2025.

I will tell you what else I don't like about Russell Vought. He wants to weaponize the justice system to prosecute officials who investigated President Trump's crime. Weaponizing the justice system is absolutely wrong. That is what happens in third-world countries with dictators.

And I realize, as an advocate of the imperial Presidency, Vought wants to use every tool available, like a dictator does. But that is wrong. We are a republic; we are not a monarchy. We are not an authoritarian state--unless we become one by refusing to stand up against violations of laws and the Constitution.

You know, Ben Franklin, when he was leaving the Constitutional Convention, was asked by a bystander, because they had met and worked on this crafting of the Constitution: Ben Franklin, what do we have? What type of government do we have?

And he responded: A republic, if we can keep it.

But what are the fundamental elements of a republic?

The integrity of the voting booth is one--the ballot box, the integrity of an election--and that integrity is under assault across this country.

Second, the peaceful transfer of power--and President Trump, at the end of his first term, did everything possible, including incentivizing a riot that stormed through these doors and took over this Chamber, to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. They were calling for the Vice President, who was fulfilling his constitutional role, just down the hallway through those doors--down the hallway--to count the electoral votes. They were calling for him to be hung.

What else is critical to a republic? Well, it is a foundation of laws that will be respected by the Executive branch. That is being violated. And it is the separation of powers that Trump is violating right now. So every piece of our Republic is under attack by Russell Vought and Donald Trump.

Ben Franklin, right now, is turning over in his grave, fearing, perhaps for the first time since he was buried 6 feet under, that we might lose our Republic.

Russell Vought also supports the use of the military to quell domestic unrest. That is an absolute violation of the law, but he supports doing it.

Russell Vought has called for an end to any drugs that provide medical abortions. He wants them banned. He wants to interfere with the right of every family, every woman in America, to exercise her judgment in partnership with her spiritual adviser and her family and her doctor. He wants Big Brother government to be in the exam room of every woman in America, dictating whether or not they can use drugs as part of an abortion process. And he also doubles down on this saying there should be no exceptions to a law banning abortions, for rape or for incest or to save the life of the mother.

You know, I was absolutely struck by the recent memo from the new Secretary of Transportation that said: We are going to prioritize giving our grants to communities that have the highest birthrate and highest marriage rate.

What? Big Brother, socially programming, using transportation grants to determine who gets to repair their bridges or repair their roads or expand their metro system or build bike lanes, or whatever, depending on your marriage rate and your childbirth rate? That is in the memo from the Department of Transportation.

Well, here is Russell Vought. His social programming is he wants his view of reproductive healthcare to be imposed across America with Big Brother, Big Government, in the exam room of every American woman. That is who this man is. Those are his dangerous views.

Presidents are not kings. Laws are not suggestions--unless Russell Vought is confirmed and makes it so. If he is confirmed and makes it so, we have failed to defend our democracy. We have failed to defend our Republic.

We were elected by our citizens of our respective States to be here with the vision of government by and for the people, not the vision of government by billionaires, for billionaires; not the vision of Big Brother government going into our living rooms and into our exam rooms, telling us to have children in order to get a transportation grant. But that is the type of social programming we are facing.

To my colleagues across the aisle, you all have pointed out quite accurately that you are threatened with a primary funded by Elon Musk if you don't loyally follow step by step, move by move, everything Trump wants to do, including confirming Russell Vought.

I say to you: Stop trembling in your boots. You are being threatened. You are being pressed. You are being extorted. Stand up and say: I am a Senator of the United States of America. I was not elected by President Trump. I was not elected by Russell Vought. I was not elected by Elon Musk and the billionaires. I was elected by the people of my State, and I am going to fight for them.

That is your responsibility. That is your path to escape the dilemma we have heard you express. I don't believe, at any other time in our history, the President of the United States has threatened to sic the billionaires against Members of the U.S. Senate, and we need to stand together and say: Hell no.

That is what it means to defend the Constitution. That is what it means to be a Senator, this privileged position, elected by the citizens of our State in order to pursue what the people are asking us to do to build a stronger Union and better opportunity for every, every citizen.

Donald Trump and Russell Vought are trying to use their Executive orders to break the spirit of the American people, to break the will of Congress, to break the back of the Constitution. Such plans are evil, and every one of us, Democrat or Republican, should say: We will not be intimidated. We will not cower. And we will not bend to fear of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Trump may inflict his worst, but we must awaken our best.

President Franklin Roosevelt said: We won't let them ``clip the wings of the American eagle to feather their own nests.''

Colleagues, stand with me. Stand together. Stand as Senators united to stop the President from clipping the wings of the American eagle to feather the nest of the billionaires. To protect our constituents, to protect the Constitution, to oppose this sweeping authoritarian coup, to stand with American families and against the betrayal of those same families, we are coming to the floor united to say: We must not confirm the nomination of the most unfit man to be considered as Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

You all have heard me say a few words about impoundments. It is a big word, but it is a big word for a simple action. It means that the President refuses to spend the money that he is required to spend by law on a program.

Oh, I don't like healthcare programs that we are doing. And the law says here is what you must spend for this particular program in the coming year, and the President says: No, not doing it.

Yes, well, that is illegal, and it is unconstitutional. It is not up for debate.

In the 1970s, President Nixon did exactly this action, impoundment, to stop funds for the Environmental Protection Agency for individual programs that he didn't like. He told his EPA Administrator, Russell Train, to withhold the funding. A recipient of those funds was the city of New York, and the city sued. And in that case, Train vs. City of New York, the Supreme Court ruled that the White House did not have the power to impound funds and refuse to do what the law says you are supposed to do.

And, furthermore, the Supreme Court said: This is inherent in the Constitution. The Executive is to execute the laws, not to make the laws, not to remake the laws, not to ignore the laws, not to treat the laws as a suggestion.

The Executive must faithfully implement the laws of the United States of America. That is the responsibility.

Congress, in the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act, did create a way for the President to say: I am not just waiting on the budget next year. I am not just weighing in on what programs I want for the next year. I want to change the ones this year.

And we gave him--Congress did--a tool to do so. That is the tool of rescission that I mentioned before.

Well, let's fast forward from 1974 and the battle with Nixon to 1996. In 1996, there was a very interesting debate over the balanced budget amendment. And you needed 67 Senators to approve, in both bodies, this constitutional amendment. The House easily passed it. Here, in the Senate, the Republican chair of the Appropriations Committee said: No, every year, through our revenue bills and through our spending bills-- appropriations bills--we decide what the deficit will be, and we can decide, in a year, it shall be zero.

But we shouldn't be so constrained to address national emergencies, whether it be a famine from drought or whether it be war or whether it be COVID--of course, COVID or some disease--that we shouldn't be so constrained as to be unable to meet the moment.

So Senator Hatfield from Oregon said no, he would not be the 67th vote. And then he offered to resign. And what the history books rarely record is that in Oregon the Governor does not have the power to appoint an individual to the Senate seat, which meant there would have been 99 Senators, and 66 would have been enough to pass that constitutional change, and it would have gone out to the States for ratification.

Well, the majority leader, Robert Dole, turned down Hatfield's offer to resign. So the 67 standard was not met.

Well, then the Republican leadership said: Let's give the President line-item veto--essentially, give the President impoundment power, impoundment power that the Courts said the President doesn't have.

And so they passed a law and gave the President impoundment power-- line-item veto--and it went to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said: Hey, Congress, the Constitution charges you with the responsibility to lay out what will be funded for what programming. You can't simply delegate to that President. If you could, you could have a majority in the two Chambers that says: We give the power to make up any law the President wants and then to enforce it.

In other words, it would be a pathway toward an authoritarian takeover of our country, if Congress abandoned its constitutional role to set the parameters for what programs are funded. And so the Supreme Court struck it down.

Well, here we have, again, Russell Vought ignoring the Supreme Court in Train vs. City of New York, ignoring the Supreme Court when it struck down the line-item veto, and once again threatening to so undermine the law and the Constitution.

Colleagues, my fellow caucus members will be coming through the night to share their perspectives and why Russell Vought is untrustworthy, unelected, and unfit to serve as the Director of Office of Management and Budget.

I believe that my colleague from Hawaii is going to carry the train of this conversation forward, and, therefore, I am wrapping up my comments while he figures out some issue at the counter. But I want you to all go forward into this long 30 hours knowing just a core fact: that we only have a republic if we can keep it, and we can't keep it if we put a man at the head of OMB who is determined to break the law and violate the Constitution.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes of my postcloture debate time on the Vought nomination to Senator Van Hollen, and I yield 60 minutes of my postcloture debate time on the Vought nomination to Senator Schatz.

Mr. President, since yesterday afternoon, Democrats have held this floor to ring the alarm bells across the United States of America about the nomination of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.

Russ Vought may not be as famous as Donald Trump's other nominees, but as you have heard from so many Democrats, ``Radical Russ'' is Donald Trump's most dangerous nominee. He is the mastermind behind Project 2025. In following that script, he proudly breaks the law, he proudly violates the Constitution, and he proudly seeks to gut programs for ordinary American families to deliver trillions in tax giveaways to the richest Americans.

Russell Vought's dead-of-night directives to freeze government payments have already sown massive damage across our Nation--programs for healthcare and housing and education and children.

Then, just today, I learned that the Bureau of Land Management is ordering small businesses to cease and desist all work for forest management--that of thinning the forests and doing prescribed burns to prevent massive forest fires from burning down our cities. That is literally Trump and Russ Vought playing with fire.

The American people are angry about this sweeping authoritarian coup. They are calling our offices. Two thousand Oregonians called my office yesterday. Thousands of people showed up to my nine townhalls over the last two weekends.

They are asking tough questions:

How is it possible that Donald Trump could order dead-of-night directives and cut off funding for all of the programs that help families get on their feet and thrive and get to the middle class-- those addressing child nutrition and affordable housing and healthcare?

How is it possible that Trump can break the law to fire 17 inspectors general who protect the American people from executive branch corruption?

How is it possible Trump can break the law to fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board, who protects workers' rights?

How is it possible Trump can dismantle USAID, which provides food and medicine and humanitarian aid around the world?

How is it possible Russ Vought and President Trump can send Elon Musk's groupies to access sensitive programs and access our data regarding Social Security payments and Medicare payments and veterans' benefits and the tax records of every single American?

This breach of privacy by Big Brother government is an extraordinary threat to the security of every single citizen.

``Radical Russ'' has a three-part plan for America: Gut programs for working families, borrow trillions from the Treasury, and give massive tax giveaways to the very richest Americans. This is the robber baron script: Take from ordinary families to give more to the best off.

This is the opposite of what Trump campaigned on. He campaigned on helping families, and now that he is in office, the campaign is giving way to, instead, Project 2025, which is about government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.

That is why the Democratic members of the Budget Committee asked to delay the vote on sending his nomination here to the floor--because we wanted to find out. We asked questions about what he was doing already over at the Office of Management and Budget when he hadn't been confirmed yet, holding meetings and sending out directives. He wouldn't answer those questions, so his file is incomplete. So we said to hold off for 2 weeks, but the Budget Committee chair refused to hold off and make sure that the file was complete.

Then we said: Well, at least hold the meeting in public so we can share our thoughts back and forth, and the public can come in and witness it and see our arguments about why he should or shouldn't be voted to send to the floor. Instead, the meeting was held in private.

So that was why we were so concerned then and, as you have heard from 41 Democrats over the last 30 hours, why we are so concerned now with the philosophy and actions of ``Radical Russ'' Vought. We are working day and night, fighting for working families, fighting for the Constitution, and fighting to stop this sweeping authoritarian takeover.

To my friends across the aisle: ``Radical Russ'' wants to steal the power of

the purse given to Congress in this Constitution--our Constitution--and give it to Donald Trump to decide what is and isn't funded.

``Radical Russ'' wants to steal the power to write laws given to Congress and the Constitution and give it to Donald Trump to rule by Executive order and Presidential fiat.

``Radical Russ'' has attacked the Constitution before. Remember, he is the force that said ``Let's stop payments to Ukraine'' that got President Trump into trouble in his first administration.

We here have taken an oath to defend the Constitution for working Americans--for all Americans. Join us in voting no because ``Radical Russ'' is dangerously unfit for public office.