Floor Statements

Would my colleague yield to a question?

Thank you.

Mr. President, I was hoping my colleague would stay on the floor to have a little bit of discussion about the topic he just raised because there seemed to be some missing elements in his discussion.

And isn't that kind of what happens here, where we hear from our leadership about all of these terrible things the other side is doing, and we just kind of swallow that hook, line, and sinker, rather than actually looking at the record.

Now, one of the pieces left out of his story was 1974, 100 Senators on this floor said: We are going to create a special fast track, filibuster-free, for one single purpose: reducing the deficit. And think of Robert Byrd of West Virginia. And Robert Byrd was an adamant-- adamant--advocate for the filibuster. Unfortunately, he had been very supportive of using the filibuster to block civil rights bills. But, in general, he was dedicated to making sure that it stayed in place. And even he joined 99 other Senators to say: Hey, we should have a special fast track solely for reducing the deficit. That was 1974.

At that same time, that same bill created the Congressional Budget Office so we would use honest numbers in putting forward spending bills because if we are going to actually reduce the deficit, we have to quit using smoke and mirrors to pretend that what we are spending is less than it really is.

So let's go forward 22 years to 1996. And in 1996, we were in the middle of the first term of the Gingrich revolution. The election of 1994 had been of dramatic success for Republicans in the House, picking up dozens of seats with an agenda for America. And in that agenda was something called the line-item veto. And the line-item veto was the idea that we would delegate our constitutional responsibility of the power of the purse to the President of the United States of America and say the President can decide what is spent on what programs.

And the Supreme Court said: Oh, no. You can't do that. You have a constitutional responsibility under the separation of powers. Under the checks and balances, Congress, by law, establishes what must be spent on each program, not the President of the United States.

Certainly, the President gets a role. The President provides the budget. The President has to sign the spending bills. But Congress could not take the power assigned to it and simply hand it over to the Executive. That is the way you end up in a strongman state.

And so the Supreme Court wiped out, in 1996--well, they canceled, if you will, the line-item veto power that Congress tried to give the President.

And so the Republican team controlling the House and Senate said: Well, we have another idea, and that other idea is a balanced budget constitutional amendment. Now, that happens to require two-thirds of both bodies here to vote for it and then three-quarters of the States to do a constitutional amendment.

It easily flew through the House of Representatives. All very good. It came over to the Senate, and we needed 67 votes for that, and there were 66 votes. The 67th vote was potentially the chair of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Hatfield from Oregon, and Senator Hatfield said: This is a bad idea. Here is why it is a bad idea. Sometimes we are at war, and we need to spend more money. Sometimes we are in recession, and we need to spend more money. And we do decide every single year, and we are in the majority, Republican majority, we decide every single year how much is going to be spent through the spending bills, the appropriations bills. And we decide through the revenue bills how much is going to be raised. So we already have the power to do a balanced budget in the years that it should be balanced, but we need to retain the power to address these emergencies.

It is kind of an interesting story in that Senator Hatfield, for standing on this principle as the chair of the Appropriations Committee, was vilified--vilified--for defending the responsibility of the power of the purse held here. And, in fact, he was so vilified that he even received a message from his son-in-law with a picture of his granddaughter, saying: For her sake, you should do this.

He then went to the majority leader, Senator Dole, and said: If you feel so strongly this is right, and clearly I feel it is a mistake, I will resign. And Senator Dole decided, no, we are not going to ask you to resign. We are not going

to suggest that is the right answer. And so it fell one vote short.

There is kind of an interesting twist to this story because Oregon did not have a law that allowed a Governor to appoint a replacement. So had Senator Hatfield resigned, there would have been 99 Senators, and then you would have only needed 66 votes for the balanced budget amendment. But that did not transpire because Senator Dole turned Senator Hatfield's offer down.

So then what happened? Well, a little bit of frustration among the Republican majority. Their line-item veto had been knocked down by the Supreme Court. Their constitutional amendment had not cleared the Senate. And they said: We really want to do a massive tax bill, particularly giving huge breaks for the richest Americans. And they said: Ah, but we can't do it. We can't get it done. Why not? Because the Democrats won't agree to massive tax breaks for the richest Americans. So we won't be able to get the 60 votes we need to be able to pursue this path.

And then what happened? Well, Majority Leader Dole and others conferred and said: Let's do a nuclear option. And let's take this strategy, this tool, that we created in 1974 to reduce deficits, and let's repurpose it and allow it to be used to increase deficits--of course, not at all what the 100 Senators had voted on in 1974.

Well, that was pretty dramatic to proceed to take a tool, reconciliation, invented in 1974 to reduce deficits and to say it can be used to increase deficits. Well, so dramatic, in fact, that it couldn't be done unless they overturned the opinion of their Parliamentarian. So they fired the Parliamentarian. That is what the Republicans did. They fired the Parliamentarian and they brought in a new Parliamentarian and his name was Robert Dove.

Now, Robert Dove had been here in 1974. He knew about why they passed this bill with 100 Senators to have a fast track with no filibuster was only for decreasing the deficits. But where had Mr. Dove been working? He had been working for the majority leader, Robert Dole. And so he took and he came in and he ruled--or provided the recommendation to the chair--that it was just fine to completely repurpose this 1974 tool called reconciliation for decreasing the deficits so it could be used to increase deficits. That was the nuclear option. Wow.

Now, my colleague didn't mention any of that. He talked about lighting the fuse. Lighting the fuse, as if Democrats had been degrading the structure of this institution. But I would suggest maybe there is responsibility on both sides of the aisle. What was done in 1996 was a dramatic--dramatic--well, contravention of the very core of the understanding that every Democrat and every Republican had agreed to. It was a deal broken--deal broken--in the exercise of power politics.

Or let's go forward to 2008, and this man named Barack Obama ran for President. He was a Member of the Senate, and he was elected. At that point, something dramatic happened, and that is the minority leader decided to undertake a dramatic blockade of President Obama's nominees. I mean, couldn't fill the National Labor Relations Board, couldn't get the Labor Secretary into place. The list went on and on and on.

Well, Democrats didn't respond with a nuclear option. They responded with: Let's work this out. Let's preserve the supermajority on nominations. But to preserve it, we can't abuse it in this fashion.

Just the number of blockades of nominations soared dramatically. This instrument that had really almost never been used on nominations, it started being used routinely on the Republican side of the aisle. That was left out of the speech you heard a few minute ago.

So we negotiated. We pleaded. It was like a 9-month process. And, finally, we all met in the Old Senate Chamber--no staff present. I don't know if there was anyone to even record the comments for history, and we basically talked to each other in very real terms about let's preserve this supermajority on nominations. But it can't be that the minority uses that as a blockade against a President to keep qualified people from being put into office. An agreement was reached that that blockade would be dialed back enormously.

I recall that a month or so into that, there was us on the verge of the minority blocking a very qualified individual that there was no justification for. I remember Senator McCain grabbing the arm of a fellow colleague coming down the aisle over here and saying: We mustn't do this. We agreed to not be irresponsible in blocking qualified people. And that person just got the 60 votes and went through.

All good and well, like we had resolved this conflict and preserved the supermajority, until the minority leader changed his mind and said: I don't care how qualified a nominee is from President Obama for the DC Circuit Court. We are going to block anyone--anyone--from being assigned to fill those seats.

Well, that was the final straw.

As much as Harry Reid tried to, as majority leader, say: Back off, don't do that; that is a violation of the agreement we reached in the Old Senate Chamber, the minority leader said: No, we are not going to allow Obama to put a single justice on the DC court.

A few arguments--policy arguments--were made by the minority leader to support the position. He said: I think they have enough justices already. We don't need to fill those additional positions. But that is not an argument that had ever been used here, that even though courts had a huge backlog, they didn't need the additional justices.

No, it was just a plain outpower move to block the President of the United States from putting people on the DC Circuit Court.

Why was that the target? Well, for one reason, the DC Circuit Court considers--a lot of the national issues go through the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. And for another, a lot of folks who eventually get nominated to the Supreme Court serve on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. That makes it kind of a pretty important place.

But this pretty important place where justices consider pretty important issues and sometimes have a chance to be recognized as someone who might be a good candidate for the Supreme Court was blocked by the minority. And he has made all the efforts to undo that. The minority said: No, regardless of qualifications, we are going to back up the minority leader and not allow any justices to be appointed, no matter how qualified they are.

So I am just adding to the conversation that my colleague began--who proceeded to throw in kind of a dialogue of, say, all the obstruction here stems from one side of the aisle, the blue side of the aisle--I am suggesting that there have been moments where both sides have stretched their power. There have been moments when both sides have sought--and sometimes successfully--to resolve that conflict.

But in the end, there have been some big moments in which the Republicans have torn down the system. That may be true for the Democrats, as well. But it might be helpful to have a more balanced conversation.

And while we are at this dialogue, recognizing factors that have occurred on both sides of the aisle, let's talk about something else that never happened in U.S. history until it happened by the Republicans refusing to hold a debate and a vote on a Supreme Court nomination. It had never happened until the last year of the Obama administration when a vacancy became open due to an untimely death and the President nominated a candidate to fill that seat. And Republicans said: We are not even going to allow a debate or a vote--the first time in the history of the United States of America.

I was just reading a column the other day that referred to this as the ``stolen seat.'' I noticed it because that is what I called it at the time. I said this is wrong. Once one side steals a seat from a President, it will be horrifically difficult to fix that problem because if the Democrats have the same chance to do the same and balance things out, now you just have a tradition of stealing seats.

You have a Republican President and a Democratic majority that blocks debate on a nominee until the next election, hoping that you will keep that seat empty until there is a Democrat in the Oval Office. That just means we have locked in obstruction.

I came to this floor at 6 p.m. and started speaking and addressed my comments to the majority leader

across the aisle and the minority leader and said: Please get together. There have been several recommendations for fixing this, because if this seat is stolen in this fashion--kept empty until the next President comes in--we will never be able to fix it. There is no path for fixing it.

I proceeded to make that plea through the night up until cloture ripened--that is a motion to close debate--ripened the following morning, 15\1/2\ hours later.

Why would I stand on this floor 15\1/2\ hours later? Because I was asking my Republican colleagues: Do not tear down this institution.

That is three examples of what the Republican side has done. It didn't come up in my colleague's speech.

Let's talk about a fourth. I see my colleague from Illinois is here and I am going to defer to him. The fourth was just recently in which, for the first time ever since the 1974 act, we passed a bill--I say we passed a bill--Republicans passed on a partisan line bill, a spending reconciliation bill that will create deficits beyond a 10-year window. They had already blown up the agreement from 1974 that there could be no deficits created in a 10-year window. They blew that up in 1996, as I referred to. Then they proceeded to blow up, just weeks ago, the second half, second pillar of that deal, that there would be no deficits after that 10-year period.

Then they blew up the third pillar of that 1974 act, which was: We would use honest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office in laying out what a bill costs.

I say to my colleague across the aisle who was speaking before me: You pointed out things that you feel Democrats stretched the boundaries and damaged this institution, but you left out enumerable cases that I have just pointed to. Isn't it time to not do one more damage to this institution and, instead, get together a group from each side to wrestle with the issue at hand?

It is my understanding that as of this moment, this day, there is almost exactly the same number of nominees that have been approved to date under the Trump administration as there were under the Biden administration, a similar number of days under his administration-- almost exactly the same number. I think the hyperbole across the aisle is profoundly exaggerated.

Let me yield to my colleague from Illinois, who stands ready to share a few thoughts.

Mr. President, would my colleague from Maryland yield for a question?

If I understood your presentation right, this is, word for word, exactly the same--this bill--as the amendment you proposed in the appropriations meeting.

Well, I can tell you I have read through it, and it looks like, to me, exactly the same. And we heard from our colleague from Wyoming that this was a Republican proposal, which you clarified that, actually, you introduced it but also observed that it was passed unanimously.

So I am confused. If my colleague from Wyoming liked it so much that he wanted to claim authorship and he proceeded to say, We liked it so much, we passed it unanimously, why is he objecting now to actually getting it passed?

If the Senator would yield to another question.

This seems extremely--well--minimal. We are preserving the records. Earlier, we asked for a vote on a bill that would be a complete disclosure because we believe that disclosure is merited given a set of extraordinary circumstances--extraordinary circumstances like President Trump dangling a potential pardon in front of Ms. Maxwell, extraordinary circumstances like the FBI itself redacting Trump's name from documents, extraordinary circumstances like Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch going and personally interviewing Ms. Maxwell and not taking along the lawyers who were experts in this case, and then, just shortly after, she was transferred to a minimum security prison in Texas--in other words, rewarded in a powerful way. There is a big difference between a regular prison and a minimum security prison.

So we wanted disclosure, and I think America wants disclosure because they want to see people held accountable who have perpetrated crimes-- rape--against young girls. And yet all you are asking for is to preserve the information, that it not be deleted or put into a shredder or put into a wood chipper. Is that right? Is that what the Senator is asking for?

Another question, if I might.

If I turn the clock back to that Appropriations Committee hearing where you presented your amendment and I was present, was that not voted out of committee on a voice vote?

So the Republicans in committee said we support the idea, but let's do it by voice vote because we don't want to have our names recorded, yea or nay; is that correct?

Had the Senator not objected, we could have passed this bill today by voice vote, not necessarily having a recorded vote.

Because it doesn't even get to a--

It would have been unanimous.

So even though it was passed out of committee by voice vote, and you offer a proposal simply to keep the records intact--which I must say, should never have to be

asked anyway--but why would any Member of the Senate object to the principle of protecting the records?

I mean, I am confused. Don't all of us believe that when there is evidence related to a crime, it should not be put into a shredder or a wood chipper?

Well, I appreciate my colleague from Maryland bringing this forward. It seems like the absolute minimum we should do now is protect the evidence for the future. Certainly, it should be released, as both of us have spoken to.

I really appreciate my colleague from California who brought his legal expertise, along with our colleague from Rhode Island who put out how extraordinary it is that a Deputy Attorney General would go and sit in a prison interviewing a key witness to criminal activity and that magically, within hours thereafter, she is transferred to minimum security, and the President starts talking about the possibility of a pardon.

Americans, this is just stinking to high heaven. I will repeat the point I made earlier today. No one should be above the law. No powerful man should be able to rape young girls and be protected by friends in high places or by legions of lawyers or any other circumstances. Let the rule of law come forward in full force to hold those who have committed egregious crimes be held accountable.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I know of no further debate.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, we will soon be voting on bipartisan appropriations bills. These represent the spending strategy that has been worked out between Democrats and Republicans on the committee.

When I came here as an intern some 49 years ago, Senator Hatfield was very engaged on the Appropriations Committee, and he was later chair. I really enjoyed interning for him and hearing how appropriators really considered themselves as, well, first appropriators before they were Democrats or Republicans and how important it was to forge a vision going forward that addressed the needs in every geographic area of the country, in both rural and urban areas, and to bring in the collective voices of everyone together that would help take the country forward.

When Senator Hatfield was ill and not far from passing from this planet, in the last conversation I had with him, he expressed his concern about the committee losing that sense of bipartisan collaboration, and he mentioned specifically--and he was a Republican-- working with Patty Murray and with a Democrat, Daniel Inouye, as some of his fondest memories.

Thus, when I ran for reelection, it didn't seem very likely I would win, but I said: If I run, can I be in the first group in my class to be appointed to the spending committee, to the Appropriations Committee? Because I know how important a voice on this committee has been for Oregon as to what we need to be done on water systems, both clean water presentation and septic or sewer systems; how important it is on transportation and to tackle many of the needs that we have throughout our forests, both our national forests and our BLM lands--so many concerns that are addressed. The leadership on the Democratic side said yes.

Then, miraculously--it was an easy promise to make because I wasn't likely to win, but you never know what is going to happen, and I ended up here in the Senate. I was appointed to this committee, and I am very pleased to be on this committee.

But I am concerned now that a huge threat exists to further degrade this bipartisan cooperation, and that is that we have this process called rescissions--a fancy term--and it exists from the 1974 bill, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act. It says that a President can send a request to Congress to undo the bipartisan work that was done here by the spending committee, by the Appropriations Committee. That has never been used in this fashion until this year.

Now, it isn't that there haven't been rescissions--rescissions mean repealing former funding decisions--but they have been done by the Appropriations Committee.

So what has been forged together--Democrats and Republicans together, with every geographic area of the country represented--in that bipartisan

fashion has for the first time been undone in a partisan fashion.

Now we are hearing that Mr. Vought at the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, is planning to send a rescissions package to us maybe in the middle of August. Why is this important, and why is this a problem and a challenge? It is because he has expounded on a theory that he calls a pocket rescission, and that is, if the fiscal year ends on September 30, which it does, and if he sends it within the last 45 days, he believes that he can thereby, even if we were to meet in September and reject the rescission--that even then, he would be able to use a 45-day pause that is in that 1974 law to not spend the funds that we had directed.

So what does that look like? That looks like a law was passed to spend the funds, but with no change in the law, the President's team stalls until the end of the year, sends in a rescission, and then stalls to the very end of the year and never spends the money. In other words, what was passed into law never happens.

This is a direct attack on the power of the purse, which in the Constitution is allocated to Congress. In that sense, we on the Appropriations Committee are carrying that responsibility, that constitutional responsibility of the power of the purse.

In facing this in the past, the Supreme Court has weighed in twice. The first time was in 1996. Actually, the first time was in 1975. Excuse me. In 1975, the Supreme Court weighed in on the fact that a couple of years earlier, in 1973, President Nixon had frozen, or impounded, funds and not done what Congress had set in a law that had been passed in both Chambers and had been signed by the President.

The Supreme Court said: Hell no. You can't do that. Mr. President, you cannot do that. No President can do that. You have to follow the law. You cannot take the power of the purse.

Then, in 1996, Congress said: Hey, we want to give the President line-item veto.

They passed a law to do so.

The Supreme Court weighed in again and said: Hell no. You have the responsibility under the Constitution of the power of the purse.

So now we are facing the situation in which Mr. Vought is saying: The law is just a suggestion. It is just a ceiling. We can spend less if we want to. We can spend more by transferring funds from one place to the other. The law is just a suggestion.

Well, no, Mr. Vought, it is not just a suggestion, and the President is not a King.

But by doing what he is planning to do with this late rescission, he is basically trying to find a way to, well, run out the tape--``run out the clock'' I guess is the right term--run out the clock and alter the power of the purse.

So I am asking for us to stand together, Democrats and Republicans, and defend our constitutional, bipartisan responsibility and should there be a rescission that comes in in August, for us to come in the first thing in September and vote against it and therefore say no in both Chambers of Congress, thereby sending that message, because that would provide a foundation for us to challenge the strategy Mr. Vought is putting together.

In addition, today, I am asking us to join together, Democrats and Republicans, to say that nothing that is passed by us in the fiscal year 2026 spending bills--nothing that is in those bills will be subject to the 1974 rescission. So this would not be retroactive. It could not at this moment, in this bill, be able to address a possible rescission of funds from 2023 or 2024 or 2025. But we can certainly insulate the funds in 2026 from this partisan attack by the President, this unconstitutional attack by the President.

The first amendment to be up when we convene at 4:15--about 3 minutes from now--will be this amendment to say: Together, Democrats and Republicans, let's defend our constitutional responsibilities, and let's say that nothing we pass in the fiscal year 2026 bill will be subject to that strategy by Mr. Vought and President Trump.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 3114 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, this amendment protects the work that we are doing today from a future rescission happening in a partisan basis.

Now, realize this only affects FY 2026 and therefore only bills that have been both passed here and in the House and signed by President Trump.

But here is why this is important: The work that we have done on a bipartisan basis has never been undone, until this last month, in the history of the Senate since the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was passed.

Why? Because we agreed that the rescissions--that is, to repeal existing spending already in law--would be done in a bipartisan way, just as the initial bill was done in a bipartisan way.

This is important for us to work together, no matter who is in the White House in the future.

I must say, this bipartisan work is so important to preserve our responsibilities under the Constitution here in the Senate and the House, where the Constitution assigns the responsibility for the power of the purse.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. President, how many seconds do I have left?

In that case, Mr. President, my--

I ask unanimous consent for 15 seconds for my colleague and 15 seconds for myself on why this should or should not be waived.

Please go ahead.

Thank you.

I will borrow his 15 as well as mine.

Motion to Waive

Mr. President, we do have the power to waive this. It does take 60 votes, but this would be all of us together saying we should defend the bipartisan work here now, just as we have through the entire history since 1974. We are talking about a half century of bipartisan strategy being undone with the possibility of partisan rescissions.

Let's do our rescissions in a bipartisan way, in committee. And for that reason, unless there is a rebuttal from my colleague, I will make the formal request to waive.

OK, continuing.

Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Review Act of 1974 and the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and applicable budget points of order for the purposes of the pending measure.

Vote on Motion

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I appreciate the comments from my colleague from Colorado. I don't think it is unique to the States out West, be it Oregon or Colorado or California or Idaho or Nevada or so forth. I think people in every single State care about access to healthcare.

Now, I came to the Senate in 2009, and in that year, we decided to make a major effort to fill in huge holes in our healthcare system. Well, we had Medicaid for the least affluent, but then folks who were just above that, they couldn't afford private insurance; they also didn't qualify for Medicaid, so we created extended Medicaid and made it a State option that covered a lot more people.

And then when you came to the middle class, you had folks who had insurance through their employer but not every employer provided insurance. And so we created the healthcare exchange where you could buy insurance and you could do so with tax credits to help you make the payments so that they were affordable.

Well, that plan was pretty straightforward, but a man named Frank Luntz--he was a pollster and messagemaker for the Republicans--put out a memo. And I was one of the first Members of the Senate to see this memo. It was April of 2009. And the memo said: Whatever the Democrats come up with to improve healthcare, we are going to call it a government takeover because we have done focus groups, and that scares Americans. It makes them dread this.

And it doesn't matter what the policy is, we will call it a government

takeover. And I came down here to the floor, at that point my desk was much farther over here, around the corner, and I waved this around and said: Is this what America has come to? Instead of working together to improve the healthcare system, instead, we are so polarized that the minority wants to stop us from improving healthcare, even if it makes sense. And they are going to make up a falsehood and sell it across America.

Well, apparently, that is what America had come to because they did promote that falsehood all across America.

Now back home in Oregon, I have made a commitment to go to a townhall in each of my 36 counties every year, open hour. People can come and share whatever they want.

I am out in Prineville, OR, where, normally, there would be, like, 30 or 50 people at a townhall and about 500 people show up. Why? Because they are terrified of a government takeover of the healthcare system. There was about 200 people inside the room. There are several hundred people outside who can't get in because the room is completely packed. And they are angry. They are very angry.

And one man shouts out and says: Why won't you listen to us and stop this government takeover?

And I said: I will listen to everybody in this room. I will describe major features of the plan, and you all can respond to me: Step forward or step backward. So I said: How about requiring insurance policies to cover pre-existing conditions? Step forward--80 percent of the people in the room raised their hand. Step backwards--about 10 percent. Another 10 percent didn't vote.

I said: How about having preventive tests free because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Step forward--80 percent yes.

How about having children on your policy to age 26? Again, 80 percent yes.

How about having a website where you can compare private insurance policies so you can pick the best one for your family? Again, 80 percent yes.

Well, by now, people are looking around the room going: Well, this all sounds pretty good. Of course, they came, and they were very angry.

I said: Let's talk about the economics of this. How about providing tax credits to help middle-class Americans buy insurance from private companies? Again, 80 percent yes. People liked that idea.

How about expanding Medicaid because we have the least affluent in our society who are trapped between just a little too affluent to qualify for Medicaid, but they certainly can't afford private insurance.

Oh, no. That sounds good too.

And so I would say then: Thank you very much for the feedback on the major features of the plan. There is no government takeover in it, but you have all expressed to me your support for many of the features, and that is why I am supporting it.

Well, this was the year 2009. You had a blue trifecta that said: Let's fill in the holes on healthcare, and we went about and did it. And now let's fast forward to 2025. You don't have a blue trifecta; you have a red trifecta. And the red trifecta knows how important health insurance is, so they made some promises. And the promises were: We will not touch your healthcare. We will not force people off insurance. And, in fact, they did exactly the opposite.

In 2009, the House, the Senate, the Oval Office working together to fill in the holes and make sure everybody could get healthcare; 2025, the red trifecta, the Oval Office, Republican leadership in the House and Senate say: We are going to tear down your access to healthcare. And that is what they did in the one big ugly betrayal of a bill voted a few weeks ago right here in this Chamber, tearing down your healthcare. And 15 million Americans are going to lose access to healthcare because of this bill.

Here is the philosophy we saw: Roll out the red carpet for the rich and powerful. Roll out the redtape for the less affluent. Wow. What a horrific strategy to rip healthcare away from 15 million people.

What does that mean to a family when they lose health insurance? Well, I will tell you. It means that they don't go to the doctor. And when they don't go to the doctor, that lump they ignored becomes ravaging breast cancer with horrific consequences for the woman, the family, the children. It means diabetes delayed is diabetes that is much more severe and hard to treat. It means all sorts of risks for the individual and all sorts of consequences for the family and the stress of knowing you have a healthcare condition and you should go to a doctor but you don't go because you can't afford to go.

Or maybe you do buy a policy, but now it is more expensive. Here is what is going to happen on the healthcare exchange in Oregon. The cost is going to go up by 68 percent, an estimated $1,300 per family, because the big ugly betrayal of a bill raised the cost of buying healthcare on the exchange because it didn't extend the premium tax credits that were in the bill previously, that were in the system previously.

Well, that is a shocker. If people spend the money there, it may well be that they don't have the money for their rent, may not have their money to purchase the prescription pills that the doctor they went to said they need to buy, or maybe it is an impact on groceries.

And I will tell you what else happens. With so many people losing Medicaid--in Oregon, the Oregon Health Plan--and in Oregon, the estimate is 150,000 to 200,000 people will lose Medicaid.

Well, now in your rural clinics and hospitals, we have a situation where the revenue that flows to that clinic or hospital drops dramatically.

This is from the Sheps Center for Health Services Research, University of North Carolina--real experts on rural healthcare. And what do they say in this study? They say that more than 300 rural hospitals are at risk of either closing or significantly reducing their services because of the big ugly betrayal of a bill.

Oregon, four rural hospitals or clinics. Almost every state is listed here. Is that really what we want to do? We want to shut down rural healthcare?

And when you shut down a clinic, when you shut down a rural hospital, you aren't just affecting the least affluent who were on the State's Medicaid plan; you are affecting everyone in the community. Every single person loses access to the healthcare when the clinic or hospital shuts down.

We lost, 2 years ago, a maternity care ward in Baker City, OR. Tragic for the community. If you are getting ready to have a child, now you are thinking about the fact, to have it delivered, I have to go at least 70 miles down I-84, and I-84 is often closed in winter due to ice and snow.

Is that the stress? We want to rip healthcare out of our rural community and put on the stress?

And I will tell you what else happens: People simply don't get down the road for the medical treatment that they should be accessing.

So here is the story. This is wrong, so we are going to introduce a bill that reverses this and says: Everything that was ripped out of American healthcare by the big ugly betrayal of a bill, we are going to restore it. And we are going to add in the same tax credits people had access to last year. That way, there won't be a 68 percent increase for people buying healthcare on the exchange on Oregon, a $1,300 increase. That way, the middle class will still be able to afford to buy policies, and the less affluent will still have health insurance so they will get the care that they need, and the rural communities will still have the cash flow to be able to keep their clinics and hospitals open.

That is the right vision, not the vision of: Families lose and billionaires win. That is the whole vision of the big ugly betrayal of a bill. No, but, instead, a better vision. And what is that better vision? Families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share. Let's fight for that vision.

Mr. President, nobody in our country should be above the law--not a politician, not a celebrity, not a billionaire--no one. The principle of ``equal justice under the law'' is so powerful that if you walk outside these doors and you look across to the Supreme Court, you will see them carved into the facade above the pillars: ``Equal justice under law.''

No matter how powerful someone is, if they commit a crime, then they need to be prosecuted, and the American people have a right to know if information is being held related to the conduct of the crime.

So in regard to the Epstein files, there is only one right answer: the complete and total disclosure of everything, all the details, while protecting the names of the victims. Whatever a person's political party is shouldn't matter. The level of power shouldn't matter. Their net worth shouldn't matter. ``Equal justice under law'' is the vision of our Nation. If an individual is a pedophile, if an individual has raped a young girl, then they need to be held accountable. Let the chips fall where they may.

Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. He groomed and abused and raped and coordinated the rape by others of underage girls, and he trafficked these girls to rich and powerful men.

As I speak here tonight, the Department of Justice has files detailing a tremendous amount of information about his operation, and in those files, as we have heard from Pam Bondi and as she has informed the President, the President's name is among them.

Well, that doesn't mean that he was somebody who participated in a crime. He could be listed as an associate. He could be listed as a friend. He could be listed as somebody who attended a gathering. We don't know. In fact, we don't know about any of the names that are in those files as to what they did. But that is the point. As to the names of the powerful people who associated with an individual--Jeffrey Epstein--who was running an international sex trafficking ring--all of that information must be disclosed. Full disclosure is the only option.

Every detail should be brought to light, and anyone who committed egregious crimes should be held accountable no matter who they are.

My colleague from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and the Senate Finance Committee have been investigating Mr. Epstein's financial network for years. They have been seeking disclosure.

I have a letter that Senator Wyden wrote. It reveals more than 4,700 suspicious wire transfers adding up to more than $1 billion from just one of Mr. Epstein's bank accounts and hundreds of millions of dollars in other bank accounts. What would that information show us about who they went to? What questions would it lead us to ask, and what questions would that information answer? The American public has every right to know the questions that Senator Wyden and the Finance Committee are asking.

Let me be clear. That work was bipartisan work, Democrats and Republicans together calling for disclosure and accountability.

In this letter, Senator Wyden notes:

Epstein clearly had access to enormous financing to operate

his sex trafficking network, and the details on how he got

the cash to pay for it are sitting in a Treasury Department

filing cabinet.

For years, so many people across America in both parties have been demanding the release of the Epstein files, but we heard a lot from a few folks who are in the administration now.

December 15, 2023, Kash Patel said that Mr. Epstein's ``black book'' was ``under [the] direct control of the FBI.'' Well, Mr. Patel is now the Director of the FBI.

On October 22, 2024, Vice--well, he wasn't Vice President yet, but now he is Vice President--JD Vance said in a podcast:

Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That's an

important thing.

On February 25, 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was in office, said Mr. Epstein's client list was ``sitting on my desk right now to review.''

But, suddenly, we are hearing a different tune from people in the administration. We are hearing: There is nothing to see here, they are saying. Go look somewhere else, they are saying. This is not important, they are saying.

But not everyone agrees with that. Let's take the Speaker of the House. July 15, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN:

We should put everything out there and let the people

decide.

On July 16, Senator Majority Leader John Thune told FOX News:

I'm always a believer in transparency--I think more is . .

. better.

I agree with Speaker Mike Johnson. I agree with Majority Leader John Thune. I agree that the right principle about this information is to put everything out there.

Let us not forget that as the Senate Finance Committee is pursuing those information about the file transfers and what they show, that, ultimately, it is not about money itself but about what money tells us and the case it builds for who did what, because what really matters here is this: the victimization of young girls. That is what this is about, the abuse of young girls, the rape of young girls. That is what this is about. That is what transparency is about.

So whether the information in the Department of Justice files is about flight and travel records, names of people who were involved in various ways, names of businesses or nonprofits, other organizations, about meetings held or communications made, whether it was by email, whether it was by text, whether it was by phone call, any immunity deals, any nonprosecution agreements, any plea bargains, any settlements--whatever it is--the American people demand transparency, just as the Speaker of the House demanded transparency, just as the majority leader of the Senate has demanded transparency.

This bill requires ``no record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of any of the following: embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary,'' regardless of who they are, regardless of where they live.

But what the bill also says is the information released must protect the victims and the underage witnesses, protect those who were victims or who were underage witnesses to crimes. So information can be redacted by those victims and underage witnesses--personally identifiable information, depictions of abuse, or information that would jeopardize a Federal investigation or national security.

Colleagues, the question before us is simple: Will this body follow the lead of the Speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate and call for full transparency?

The administration has said the law doesn't allow us to do it, so I am proposing a law that gives them the power to do what they have said they would like to do--transparency.

Will we, instead, object to this law to protect perpetrators of crimes against girls? That is the question tonight: Will we protect our children, or will the information be withheld? Will we fail to demand it, fail to adopt this law to ensure that it is delivered in order to protect the powerful? That is the choice: Protect the victims, be on their side, pursue justice, or protect the powerful?

So, Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 2557, which is at the desk. I further ask that the bill be considered read three times and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Would my colleague yield for a question?

Mr. President, I ask my colleague to yield for a question. He has chosen not to, and that is his right.

But the question I would ask is this: If the Speaker of the House is demanding transparency, if the majority leader of the Senate is demanding transparency, if the American people are demanding transparency, if my colleagues who have said time and time again just months ago there should be transparency, then why does my colleague come here and object to transparency? What is it that they know that they don't want the American people to know?

To withhold this information is an assault on justice, and it is absolutely wrong. We must continue to demand that the rich and powerful are not shielded from the full force of justice if they have perpetrated crimes against underage children.

Following the attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel had every right to go after Hamas, but how they do so matters. Indiscriminate bombing with massive casualties, women and children, is horrific, completely unacceptable. Blocking food and medicine with the goal of inducing starvation is horrific and unacceptable. And that is true under any religious or moral code.

Let me tell you about a few children the AP reported on a couple weeks ago.

Four children who starved to death, ranging from 4 months old to 2 years old--picture that little child in your arm, their legs and arms just a twig, their ribs showing every indentation, and then, finally, their body, as it goes through malnutrition, starts to consume itself, and they died of gastric arrest. Their stomach's ability to absorb nutrition shut down, and they died. The hospital they were at, the Patient's Friends Hospital, had run out of emergency nutrition supplies.

There are supplies that are specially designed for malnutrition among children. There are high-calorie biscuits and a high-calorie peanut paste enriched with milk powder that often goes by the name Plumpy'Nut. It is designed to help children. It has a long shelf life. It doesn't have to be refrigerated. To help save them from severe acute malnutrition, couldn't we have enough such assistance that no child would be starving to death in Gaza?

Organizations across Gaza have been running out of these supplies. UNICEF warned that their locations are running out. In fact, they said they would run out of this high-nutrition assistance for children 2 weeks from now.

Doctors working with malnourished children are saying the wards are quiet. And if you have been around a ward of children, you know that they are not quiet. But why are these children quiet? Because they don't have the energy to cry.

Noura has an 11-month-old son. He is deeply malnourished. He is missing his major developmental milestones, and she says:

My son is supposed to be drinking formula milk, but there

is none . . . [and] I am barely able to breastfeed him; my

milk had almost dried up because I'm also not eating well.

And, in fact, Noura is in better condition than many other mothers because many mothers across Gaza were unable to breastfeed at all because of their own malnourishment.

Samah, another mother, relays that her family was driven from their home by air strikes--certainly true for almost every family in Gaza. And she says:

I am pregnant, but I have not eaten anything since

yesterday.

Dr. Mohammed Fadlalla of Doctors Without Borders says the Gaza ``health

system is overwhelmed, and it's collapsing.'' And a Doctors Without Borders report says that doctors and nurses are doing their best with dwindling supplies amidst ``near-daily mass casualty incidents'' and that their clinics report treating ``hundreds of people injured at food distribution sites and ongoing attacks in Gaza,'' while doctors and nurses are working day after day, shift after shift, without eating themselves.

The suffering is unimaginable. I have called for international reporters to be allowed in so we could all see exactly what is happening. I have called for Members of Congress to be allowed in to bear witness to what is happening. But the Netanyahu government has said no reporters, no Members of Congress.

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, widely reported, but understand this: 18,500 of them were children. According to a reporting by Associated Press, more than 80 children have died from malnutrition- related causes. And for every child who dies of malnutrition, there are thousands more in deep trouble.

UNICEF, in a July 25 report, said 320,000 children are at risk of acute malnutrition with thousands already suffering from severe malnutrition, the deadliest form.

This headline from the Washington Post, ``60,000 Gazans have been killed. 18,500 were children. These are their names.'' That was in today's paper. Take a look at it, colleagues. Take a look at the pages of microscopic names, all children. And every name here on this poster, a child who is less than a year old.

These are not just numbers. These are individuals, beloved by their family. Children who are dying. Children who are deeply malnourished.

Let me read you a couple names to remind us all of the fact that these are individuals, just like you are an individual, just like I am an individual, my friends, my colleagues:

Anisa Ali, Diaa Saleh Mousa, Basel Abu Jaser, Malak Abu

Saif, Wael Assaf, Sama Darwish.

All these children, almost 1,000 of them, under the age of 1. They never got a chance to pursue their dreams. They were cut down by bombing and by malnutrition.

The IPC, the world's leading hunger monitor, published a report on Tuesday, and I have that report here. Let me hold it up. This report, it says:

The worst-case scenario of famine is [currently] playing

out in the Gaza strip.

``The worst case.'' The World Food Programme reports that hunger in Gaza has reached ``astonishing levels of desperation, [and] a third of the population is not eating for multiple days in a row.''

But what do we hear from the head man, the leader in Israel, Netanyahu? He says, on Sunday, this past Sunday:

There is no starvation in Gaza.

Let me be clear. That is a lie. The world knows it is a lie. We know that it is a lie. Donald Trump knows that it is a lie. President Trump said on Monday:

Some of those kids--that's real starvation stuff, I see it,

and you can't fake that.

The use of food and water and medicine as a weapon of war against civilians--including against children, the ill, the elderly, the women--it is unacceptable. It is unacceptable under international law. It is unacceptable under any religious or moral code.

I have much more to share on this topic, many more facts I would like to present, but I want to make sure that my colleague, my colleague from Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen gets an opportunity to share his thoughts.

We have called on addressing starvation, the lack of food, going way back to January of last year, 19 months ago. We called on the Biden administration; we called on the Trump administration.

He has been a leader, understanding and reporting so many facts to help the rest of us understand what is going on.

I will be voting against any weapon of war provided to Israel until every child and every woman has adequate nutrition in Gaza.

Mr. President, I yield to my colleague.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, on July 1, 2025, the Senate passed H.R. 1, which is nothing more than one big, beautiful, betrayal for Americans across the country. This bill slashes healthcare for 17 million Americans by gutting Medicaid and dismantling the Affordable Care Act. It shuts down rural hospitals, it takes food away from more than 4 million hungry children, it makes college more expensive

for families, and it ends clean energy investments to fight climate chaos. All to make tax cuts permanent and help billionaires get richer.

And if that isn't bad enough, it destroys the architecture of fiscal discipline put in place 51 years ago and explodes the debt by $3.3 trillion over 10 years and by more than $30 trillion over 30 years-- again, all in pursuit of making billionaires richer.

And if those eye-popping debt numbers aren't alarming enough, CBO projects that if interest rates go up by as little as 1 percent, the costs could double. This is the most fiscally irresponsible bill ever to come to the Senate floor and wasn't supposed to be possible after Congress passed the 1974 Budget Control and Impoundment Act.

In 1974, addressing the deficit was such a bipartisan priority that the Budget Act created a special filibuster-free fast-track process, known as reconciliation, for the sole purpose of reducing the deficit. That is right, the original purpose of reconciliation was to reduce the deficit.

The reconciliation process was built on three pillars. First, a reconciliation bill cannot create deficits in the first 10 years. Second, a reconciliation bill can't increase the deficit in any year after the first 10 years. And third, it should be measured using honest numbers from the independent, nonpartisan, scorekeepers.

So how did we go from every Senator voting for a special process for deficit reduction in 1974, to almost every Republican, the party who claims to support fiscal responsibility, supporting a 2025 reconciliation bill that adds tens of trillions to the debt?

It started in 1996, when the Republicans wanted to pass tax giveaways for the wealthy and didn't have the required 60 votes so they turned to the reconciliation process. Except they had one problem, reconciliation wasn't supposed to increase the deficit in the first 10 years. Instead of finding a compromise, the Republicans decided to change the rules and allow a reconciliation bill to increase the deficit in the first 10 years. That was the end of pillar one, and the reconciliation process has been abused in the same way ever since--for the 2001 Bush tax cuts, the 2003 Bust tax cuts, and the 2017 Trump cuts.

But pillar two and pillar three were still standing. That is, until now. In the Republican's never-ending quest to make billionaires richer, they once again changed the rules. This time in order to hide the true cost of this bill. In doing so, pillar two and pillar three collapsed and all remaining remnants of fiscal discipline with it.

During consideration of H.R. 1, Senate Republicans upended decades of law and precedent and allowed the Budget Committee chair to abuse the authority under section 312 of the Budget Act to determine violations of section 313 of the Budget Act, also known as the Byrd Rule.

I recognize that section 312 of the Budget Act gives the Budget chair scorekeeping duties. Read in isolation, or with no understanding of past precedent, section 312 could appear to be unlimited. But it is not. The authority in section 312 must be read in combination with other provisions of the Budget Act, with other budget laws, and with Senate precedent, particularly in relationship to the Byrd Rule as it always has been.

I do not dispute that when bills are considered under regular order, it is the Budget Committee chair's responsibility to determine what numeric budget points of order lie. However, the Budget Committee chair has never determined whether provisions of a reconciliation bill comply with the Byrd Rule, that has always been the responsibility of the Parliamentarian's office.

And why is the Byrd Rule so unique from other budget enforcement tools? It is unique where it applies--just in the Senate, and not the House; it is unique when it applies--only for reconciliation, a fast track process, not regular order; it is unique how it applies and is adjudicated--a formal litigation where the Parliamentarian's office issues guidance based on written and oral arguments and nonpartisan current law scoring estimates.

It is not normal budget enforcement. Why is that? Because reconciliation is a fast track process, and Senators, with eyes wide open, voted to impose these strict guardrails on this process.

The majority's assertion of 312 authority also runs counter to section 257 of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, which defines the current law baseline. The section 257 baseline, as it is called, has been the foundation for the nonpartisan cost estimates for the past 40 years, estimates produced by the independent scorekeepers: the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The Senate has never, before consideration of H.R. 1, used cost estimates based on something other than the section 257 baseline to assess reconciliation legislation for compliance with the Byrd Rule.

To reiterate: in developing their guidance under the Byrd Rule, the Parliamentarian's office has never--never--used cost estimates other than those based on the section 257 baseline. With the majority's actions on H.R.1, Republicans have dealt the remaining pillars of reconciliation a fatal blow.

While section 312 has never been used in reconciliation, I agree that it has been used in regular order. But I want to make clear that use of section 312 authority, up until now, has only been invoked when the issue at hand was narrow, technical, often bipartisan, involved relatively small amounts of money, and was done in regular order.

For example, during the bipartisan ``side deal'' between Leader Schumer and Speaker Johnson for the fiscal year 2024 appropriations process, Democratic Senate Budget Committee Chair Whitehouse and Republican House Budget Committee Chair Arrington included a direction to CBO to use the Office of Management and Budget's estimate of housing receipts, which allowed for an extra $2.8 billion in offsets for that package.

In 2023, when the Agriculture Committee wanted to extend a dairy provision, CBO's initial estimate counted the same spending twice. Again, Democratic Chair Whitehouse and Republican Chair Arrington used the section 312 authority in a bipartisan manner to instruct CBO to conform to the way it originally scored the program.

On a bipartisan basis during the fiscal years 2023-2025 appropriations cycles, Budget chairs have directed CBO to score appropriations language related to the Purchase Power and Wheeling activities of three Federal Power Marketing Administrations consistent with a 2000 bipartisan scorekeeping agreement that CBO had recently deviated from.

By far the most common use of section 312 authority over the past decade relates to directing CBO to follow legislative text commonly included in omnibus legislation to allocate the budgetary effects to the proper committee.

These examples all illustrate how section 312 allows the Budget chair to step in to address scoring issues and resolve ambiguities. In all cases, these efforts have been narrowly applied and concerned discrete polices with limited budgetary impacts.

And again, in none of these examples was the Senate considering a reconciliation bill.

During debate on H.R.1, the majority has also falsely claimed precedent exists for their actions. I will now explain why each instance the Republicans cite is clearly distinguishable from their current abuse of section 312 authority.

Senator Graham, the current chair of the Budget Committee, claimed that former Budget Chair Kent Conrad ``used a new baseline in the budget so he could get the farm bill in the budget.'' This is a mischaracterization. In 2008, during Farm Bill negotiations, Budget Chair Conrad chose not to apply an updated CBO baseline while the bill was in conference committee. Over the course of the prior year, both the House and Senate had passed a Farm Bill and having to change all the numbers during conference negotiations would have undone a year's worth of work. There is also longstanding precedent to not update for new baseline estimates at the last minute when a bill that has been carefully negotiated is nearing completion. Further, Chair Conrad used a current law baseline to measure the farm bill. This was not a scoring manipulation meant to skirt the guardrails of a fast-track process.

Second, the majority has repeatedly referred to the Obama administration's supposed use of a current policy baseline to score a tax bill in 2012 that extended most of the expiring Bush tax

cuts. At the time, the Obama administration's Office of Management and Budget produced a ``current policy'' score that they used when publicly talking about the benefits of the bill. It served a purely messaging purpose. Congress did not--I repeat, did not--use a current policy baseline for official budget enforcement purposes in the Senate. Congress used the current law score from CBO. This bill also passed under regular order, not reconciliation.

Another example cited by the majority party is former Budget Chair Bernie Sanders including a scoring rule for childcare and pre- kindergarten legislation in the fiscal year 2022 budget resolution. This scoring rule did not override current law; rather it forced CBO to conform to current law as laid out in section 257. This Head Start scoring rule was isolated to one program that affected $18 billion over 10 years and was never ultimately used.

Before it was further amended on the Senate floor, the Senate reconciliation bill added $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the 10-year budget window. By abusing the authority under section 312, the Republicans claim that H.R. 1 actually saves $500 billion. The Finance Committee title alone adds $3.5 trillion to the deficit over the 10- year budget window. But the Republican's claim, alleging section 312 authority, that the Finance title actually saves $300 billion and thus meets its reconciliation instruction.

The blatant abuse of claiming section 312 authority to determine H.R. 1 complied with section 313 of the Budget Act is unprecedented, overrides current law, and will forever change the Senate. And it was all done to further an agenda of families lose, billionaires win.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 2863 and ask that it be reported by number.

Colleagues, a bipartisan story: In 1984, four Senators came together to reduce the risk of war. All four were veterans of World War II: two Republicans--Mark Hatfield, a Navy lieutenant, and Ted Stevens, Army Air Corps pilot; and two Democrats--John Glenn, a Navy fighter pilot, and Sparky Matsunaga with the 100th Infantry Battalion.

They knew the horror of war, and they resolved to ensure that conflict resolution and diplomacy would always be tools available to reduce the risk of war; to resolve world challenges; to reduce the risk of American servicemen and servicewomen dying in such wars. So they created the U.S. Institute of Peace. It was signed into law by President Reagan.

Marine Major General Zinni testified to the effectiveness--often unseen, often behind the scenes--of their work in Asia, in the Balkans, in Africa, and in the Middle East.

Tonight, let's channel that bipartisan support for reducing the risk of war, saving the lives of our service men and women, and sustain funding for the Institute of Peace.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to grant floor privileges to my intern for her shadow days on the following dates: Malia Perry for July 23, 2025.

My colleagues from Wisconsin and Michigan have spoken to the destructive nature of this rescission because of the programs that will be canceled midstream.

I have seen, so often, the power of our international aid programs in assisting in nutrition and fighting tuberculosis and malaria and AIDS across the world. But what many may not understand is that the small fraction--less than one-third of 1 percent--that we spend on those programs has an incredible yield not just in doing good works around the world, but have been doing good for America because of relationships that are forged through those programs. The respect that is forged through those programs comes back to benefit us in all kinds of cooperation on a huge range of diplomatic goals--be they economic; be they trade; be they issues of national security.

That is, in fact, what is referred to as ``soft power,'' and soft power is at risk with this strategy of canceling these programs.

I think about rural Oregon, where so often the warnings on floods or fires is broadcast over the public radio system, and all kinds of different channels have different programs that people become quite attached to. So there are simply good humor programs that are fun to listen to, and others are good music programs. But a lot of it is good news programs--things deeply appreciated throughout the State but often harder to access in rural Oregon. So I am concerned about this concerted attack on rural America.

First, my colleagues across the aisle say: We are going to make it very, very hard for people in rural America to get healthcare if they are on Medicaid. And then, without Medicaid financing and paying for services, you lose an entire hospital or you lose an entire clinic. The whole rural community is profoundly damaged because everyone's healthcare is affected. An attack on rural America continues through this bill.

But what I really want to talk about now is to give a sense of how this bill is an attack on the separations of power that we all here in the Senate have taken a constitutional oath to defend.

When I first came to Congress as an intern for Senator Hatfield, we were celebrating our 200th anniversary. That is so long ago, 49 years ago. And Senator Hatfield had a saying about appropriators, and that was that appropriators--that is, those Members of the Senate who served on the spending committee--they were first appropriators, and then they were Republicans or Democrats. That is how strongly they felt about their shared responsibility to manage the power of the purse.

The power of the purse--article I, section 9, of the Constitution says:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in

Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.

And here is the thing. The Congress is vested with that power, but when you decide how to spend money, you are really talking about your values. So those who serve on the Appropriations Committee were doing their best to enact the values of our country, be they investment in healthcare, in housing, in education; investments that created good- paying jobs, investments that helped small communities thrive, investments that helped build infrastructure across the country. That was the responsibility that was so cherished.

And there was a term for those who chaired the 12 subcommittees on Appropriations, and that term--the colloquial term--was that they were the Senate's ``cardinals.'' It was taken from the Catholic Church, where cardinals helped steer the church on the right path. And the cardinals of the Senate had the responsibility of steering our Nation, through our spending decisions, on the right path for the people of America.

This is, in fact, a key part of government by and for the people: that shared responsibility to spend that money wisely. But even in the early years that I was here in the Senate, we were starting to see signs of the breakdown of that relationship.

In the last conversation I had with Senator Hatfield before he passed away, he said: What happened to the Appropriations Committee?

Now, Senator Hatfield was a Republican, and he had been chair of the Appropriations Committee. And he said: I worked so closely with Dan Inouye of Hawaii, and I worked so closely with Patty Murray of Washington. What has happened to that collaboration?

That was several years ago. But as we have watched, over time, some significant things are happening that we should understand as Senators. In the not so distant past, you have tried to have a fair allocation of revenue laws that raised money, and then, as you filled the Treasury, the question became: How shall we spend it?

So the responsibility shifted from the Finance Committee to the Appropriations Committee. But, over time, it has become more and more popular to spend money for programs through tax credits and deductions. So much of the spending that was in the Appropriations Committee has shifted to the Finance Committee. And then it became more and more popular to shift discretionary spending, over which the Appropriations Committee has control, into mandatory spending. If it is mandatory, it is not a decision decided by the appropriators.

And then, on top of all that, we started to build up more and more national debt, and so all the money that went to interest on that debt is money unavailable to be spent on basic programs of healthcare, housing, education, investments that create good-paying jobs across America, infrastructure, security. That money isn't so available because it is tied up paying for interest.

So these trends are changing the role of those Senate cardinals--the chairs and the ranking members of the subcommittees who help guide us in the 12 different sections of spending. And, I will say, that problem of the debt growing, that is very significant.

Back in 1974, Democrats and Republicans came together and said: Let's have an architecture to ensure that we are very responsible and don't run up massive debt. We will have a filibuster-free pathway for one purpose, and that is to reduce deficits--only to reduce deficits.

And then my colleagues, 22 years later, across the aisle--my Republican colleagues--said: Well, you know, we want a filibuster-free pathway to do tax cuts which will increase the deficit. And they brought in a new Parliamentarian in order to get a ruling that they could do the exact opposite of what 100 Senators had agreed to. So more and more payments diverted into interest.

We had that Big Beautiful Bill, as Trump calls it--or as many of us call it, the ``Big Ugly Betrayal Bill.'' You know the one I am talking about, the one where families lose and billionaires win that was passed 2 weeks ago. Well, this rescission bill is a continuation of that vision of families lose--particularly rural families, particularly all Americans, who lose out on the advantages of soft power that we exercise around the world--and billionaires win. But it is a direct attack, as well, on the immediate process of Democrats and Republicans working together on the Appropriations Committee in this really sacred responsibility of exercising the power of the purse.

Let's examine that word ``rescission.'' It is a fancy term. What does it really mean? A rescission is a repeal of a previous spending law.

A law was passed. It spent a certain amount of money on a certain program or on a certain Agency. And a repeal of it--that is all that fancy term means.

And so the spending process is one where those members of the spending committee come together--Democrats and Republicans together-- and they work out a bipartisan bill. And in that bill, last year, for fiscal year 2025, 11 out of 12 bills that came out of the spending committee, out of the Appropriations Committee, were unanimous or nearly unanimous. Where do you look for that type of bipartisan cooperation in Congress anymore? Well, last year, in the Appropriations Committee, 11 out of 12 bills passing unanimously or nearly unanimously out of committee. But what is happening right now is consideration of undoing that bipartisan work with a partisan repeal.

Now, just kind of stick with me here about a normal deal. You make an agreement with a friend: I will do this if you do that.

Well, everyone kind of understands that is a partnership. You have an agreement. But what if one person bails on that agreement later? It is a betrayal. But bailing on the agreement is exactly what this bill is.

Democrats and Republicans together made those spending decisions, and now they are being undone in a purely partisan fashion. They are breaking the deal. They are going back on the agreement. They are breaking their word. That is pretty shameful, and it is why my colleagues have been saying: Don't do it--because it is wrong, and it has a huge impact going forward. Once somebody you have made an agreement with breaks their end of the bargain, are you going to make a second bargain with that same individual, knowing that they bailed on the first deal? The answer is probably not.

So how will we come together and continue what we did a year ago--11 out of 12 bills passing out of the Senate committee in a hugely bipartisan fashion--if one side comes back and breaks the deal? I would invite my Republican colleagues: Come to the floor and explain to me how breaking the deal that you were participating in a year ago is an honorable thing to do, and explain to me how we are going to do future deals if you are breaking the existing deal.

Now, never in the history of the Senate has there been a partisan repeal--never. This is the first time. Why? Because we understood together that a deal is a deal.

That doesn't mean the President doesn't have influence. Hey, that was just about last year's bill. The President lays out a budget for the next year and has a huge influence. The President can veto the next set of spending bills or any one of them.

But once it is locked into law--passed by the House, passed by the Senate, signed by a President--to come back and undo that in this partisan fashion, you are breaking the honor code that has made bipartisan collaboration so successful. That is why you shouldn't do it. That is why you should vote no.

Now, this question of how this affects our Constitution is significant because, as I cited, the Constitution assigns the responsibility of the power of the purse to Congress in article I, section 9. But there have been occasions before when Presidents said: We would like to actually have that power of the purse. And the President who really pursued that aggressively was President Nixon, in the 1970s. President Nixon signed a law about how money would be spent but then decided not to spend it and withheld the money from being spent on housing, on education, on highways, on agriculture, and on pollution prevention programs.

Well, of course, this was appealed on a constitutional basis because the Constitution doesn't give the President the power to impound funds. Congress, by law--and by law signed by a President--had said: Here is what must be spent on these programs. And the President came along, and President Nixon said: I don't want to do it. I am not going to do it. Take me to court.

So they went to court. And it didn't actually make it to the Supreme Court until after President Nixon was out of office, after having resigned because of the Watergate scandal. But, in a way, this was really almost a bigger scandal. This was an attack on the Constitution.

So what did the Court say in Train v. New York? And the piece of spending that made it to the Supreme Court was related to spending on water treatment systems, of all things. And the Court said: You cannot do this. You cannot impound funds. It is unconstitutional because the Constitution assigns that responsibility to Congress.

Now, if the law had been written by Congress to say the President has flexibility between here and here, maybe a modest amount of flexibility may have survived the constitutional test. But the idea that the President could just simply ignore the law? No. The Court said no.

Then there was a second test. The second test had to do, in 1996, with Congress, where Republicans controlled the House and they controlled the Senate. They decided: You know how we will tackle the deficit now--now that we have destroyed the 1974 law that said the fast track can only be used for reducing the deficit and how we switched that and said it could be used for increasing the deficit--now we have destroyed that, and we have a new plan, and we will just simply say to the President: You can line-item veto.

Again, the court weighed in, and the court said: Hell no, no you can't, because the Constitution does not say you can delegate to the President powers the Constitution assigns to you.

It assigns it to us. That is our responsibility.

So, again, the core concept here is that bipartisan work in forging a spending bill should not be done by one partner bailing on the deal that was agreed to the previous year.

Now, there is a formal way to go about doing this in a bipartisan fashion, and that is, each spending bill, in

addition to saying what we will spend next year, can contain agreements on undoing the spending from the previous year because it is the same set of people saying: We assigned funds last year, but now we see they are not needed.

Maybe the President pointed out that they are not needed.

We will undo it, but we will undo it in a bipartisan fashion in the Appropriations Committee in that same sense of a partnership working together.

So rescissions, yes. We do them all the time. But they are done on a bipartisan basis in the spending committee, not in a partisan special bill, one-sided, basically bailing on the deal struck last year-- because this strategy is a recipe for disaster, destroying the bond of trust on a deal made with each side having its priorities in a bill and then one side bailing on it--because of that, it has never happened before, and it should never happen now.

Mr. President, let's step back from the immediate loyalty test the President of the United States has put forward. The President said: It is a loyalty test. I want you to do this because I want you to bend the knee to me.

That is not the responsibility of a Senator of the United States of America, to bend the knee to the executive branch. The Constitution gives us the responsibility to design how the executive branch functions. It gives us, the Senate, the responsibility to fund the programs and the services.

The way you lose government of, by, and for the people is to have an acquiescent legislature that stops doing its job and just says ``We will respond; we will just do what the President asks'' and a deferential court. Right now, we have both.

But we took an oath to the Constitution, each one of us, to honor that oath. Do not engage for the first time ever in creating this recipe for disaster of our bipartisan responsibilities.

I appeal the ruling of the Chair, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the CBO letter of June 29 to the ranking member of the Budget Committee be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, and in this letter, it notes that the baseline was prepared--the alternative baseline--based on a request made by the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Budget.

But the letter goes on to say this:

The CBO estimates that enacting this title [VII] would

increase the deficit by $3.5 trillion over the 2025-3034

period.

Clearly, that amount, done by honest numbers from CBO, exceeds the budget resolution level, and, therefore, we should not affirm the ruling of the Chair.

It is said in this ruling, I just heard, that precedent provides a foundation for this. But, in fact, the ability of the Chair to create a phony baseline has never been used in reconciliation, not ever, and, in fact, the example cited over Head Start--Head Start--that never appeared in any budget reconciliation.

And, in fact, that conversation about Jeffrey Zients that we heard from the majority leader, that, too, was absolutely wrong. Current law was used for estimating the cost of that bill.

This is a 51-year tradition of the Senate for honest numbers--

I further ask that further reading of the motion be dispensed with.

Mr. President, I rise today to cut any part of this ``Big Ugly Bill'' that would force rural hospitals to limit their services or actually close their doors.

I have released a list of more than 300 rural hospitals across the country at risk of closing or stopping services because of any major cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

Today, that is what Republicans are guaranteeing with a $1 trillion cut to our healthcare system that they would create in this bill.

My Republican colleagues' so-called Medicaid cuts replacement fund is like giving aspirin to a cancer patient. It is not enough. It is pathetically inadequate to deal with the healthcare crisis Republicans are creating here today on the Senate floor.

No billionaire tax break or Donald Trump pat-on-the-back is worth the risk of people's lives.

Vote yes on this motion. Stop these healthcare cuts.

Mr. President, I raise a point of order. The amendment violates the Byrd rule, section 313(b)(1)(D) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Once again, Republicans have chosen the comforting embrace of partisan politics, but here are a few facts to cut through the noise: Zero Federal dollars are spent on health coverage. Second, this policy dictates how States spent their own funds. What happened to States' rights? Third, this policy violates ``innocent until proven guilty'' because it even talks about those charged with a crime. But most importantly, what this amendment says is that if one person, despite State law, through a bureaucratic mistake is receiving funds, then the whole State pays a price and has their rate on expanded Medicaid changed from 90 percent to 80 percent.

This is a backdoor for 41 States--which includes the majority of Republican States--to reduce the Federal mandate from 90 percent to 80 percent, with huge, huge impact on the coverage of individuals across this country.

Haven't we done enough damage already to the fundamental principle of healthcare without this collective punishment of American citizens by reducing the State funding from 90 percent to 80 percent?

I renew my point of order.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 2446 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, this amendment is about defending the integrity of the legislative process.

Every now and then, a new strategy creates either the appearance of a conflict of interest or a real conflict of interest. That is the case with elected officials who promote and/or sell cryptocoins in which they have a personal financial stake. These digital coins cost little to make, so the buyers know they are enriching the elected officials who are selling them. Some people believe, therefore, that perhaps they can influence government policy by buying these coins, enrich the individuals who serve in government, and, therefore, change policy. In fact, a buyer of $2 million in meme coins announced that he bought the coins to get favorable consideration in a change in trade policy.

My friends, the sale of cryptocoins by any of us for a financial benefit is corrupting our responsibility to govern by and for the people. Vote aye to defend the integrity of our ``we the people'' government.

Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive section 313 of that act for the purpose of the pending amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Vote on Motion

Mr. President, I wouldn't have much dispute for subsidizing the out-of-pocket expenses of our public school teachers. When I was a child, my dad, the mechanic, said: Son, because we are so fortunate to live in America, if you go through the doors of that public school and you study hard, you can do just about anything.

So I am certainly a lifetime fan of public education.

But in addition to expanding this for public school teachers, it has a new policy of expanding it to homeschool teachers. Well, that is quite a new policy to put into a reconciliation bill. It really should be in the Education Committee and debated and bring people to bear.

I am not immediately struck that that is a great idea, but certainly, as a new policy, it should go through committee. For that reason--for that reason--I think I will do a point of order on this particular amendment.

Point of Order

Mr. President, I raise a point of order that the amendment violates section 4106 of the fiscal year 2018 Budget Resolution, H. Con. Res. 71, of the 115th Congress, known as the Senate pay-as-you-go point of order.

Mr. President, it has been an extraordinary period here in the Senate--not a good one because it is ``families lose and billionaires win.''

We kept advocating: Join us in a better vision for America in which families thrive and billionaires--they pay their fair share for a change.

Thank you so much to the floor staff for your steadfast support through the night. The Parliamentarian team, led by Elizabeth MacDonough, has been amazing. But I want to give particular thanks to the budget team, the revenue team, and the minority leader's team, who worked so carefully together--competently, expertly.

But the result--the result is bad for America. We need to come back and have a vision in which we lift up opportunity and hope for everyone in America, not this strategy of more wealth for the best off while cutting the programs of healthcare--16 million people losing healthcare to fund tax breaks for billionaires; 4 million children going hungry to fund tax breaks for billionaires.

This is morally wrong, and we will keep fighting to the very end to say we can put America on a better course for this generation and the next.