Floor Statements

Mr. President, later today, the Senate will vote on the nomination of Jeanine Pirro to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. I urge my colleagues to examine this nominee's record and oppose her nomination.

I have heard some of my Republican colleagues claim that Senate Democrats are blocking U.S. attorney nominees in an unprecedented fashion. That is simply not true.

Two years ago, then-Senator Vance announced he would block all U.S. Attorney nominees in order to ``grind the [the Justice Department] to a halt.''

I went to the floor eight times seeking unanimous consent to quickly confirm the U.S. attorney nominees whom Senator Vance was blocking.

Senator Vance argued it was no problem to take rollcall votes on U.S. attorney nominees, stating that it is ``not too much to ask . . . to vote on cloture and vote on these nominees on the record.''

I have said time and again that there cannot be one set of rules for Republicans and one for Democrats. That said, I am willing to work with my Senate colleagues on a path forward.

However, President Trump is not making it easy to reach an agreement when he insists on installing MAGA loyalists as interim U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation.

U.S. attorneys are supposed to be apolitical law enforcement officials focused on protecting public safety. But shortly after her interim appointment to the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba told a news outlet that she aimed to ``turn New Jersey red.''

And just last year, John Sarcone, the interim U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York said the Democratic Party is ``evil in my opinion.''

District of Nevada interim U.S. attorney Sigal Chattah has a long trail of extreme, hateful comments. To take just a few examples, she called a Black Member of Congress a ``hood rat''; called a Black woman prosecutor ``ghetto''; called a prominent Black entertainer a ``monkey''; and said that Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, who is Black, ``should be hanging from

a f-ing crane.'' And these outrageous comments are just the tip of the iceberg.

Do these sound like apolitical prosecutors who are focused on keeping their communities safe? Notably, the White House has not even bothered to try working with home State Senators in each of these districts to find a consensus U.S. attorney candidates. Instead, the administration is trying to make an end-run around the Senate. This should be deeply troubling to all of us.

Which brings me to Ms. Pirro, the latest Trump loyalist nominated to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. For decades, Ms. Pirro has demonstrated that she prioritizes her relationship with President Trump over almost everything else.

Ms. Pirro repeated falsehoods about the 2020 election to millions of viewers, compelling Fox News to pay nearly $800 million to settle defamation claims brought by Dominion Voting Systems. For example, Ms. Pirro falsely claimed that Dominion ``started in Venezuela with Cuban money'' and that the company had a software backdoor to flip votes.

She has called January 6 rioters ``hostages'' and complained about the 22-year sentence imposed on Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, arguing that he should not be subject to such a long prison term.

Notably, a judge found that Tarrio's actions led to ``two hundred men amped up for battle encircling the Capitol.'' After his release, Tarrio posted a video of himself stalking officers who defended the Capitol on January 6.

Ms. Pirro has argued that prosecutors handling January 6 cases should be criminally prosecuted themselves. And now she is nominated to lead the office where many of these prosecutors still work, if they haven't been fired by Emil Bove already.

When I met with her last month, I asked Ms. Pirro if she always accepted assignments given to her by supervisors when she was an assistant district attorney. Unsurprisingly, she said yes.

But when I asked her whether it was appropriate to terminate prosecutors for their work on January 6 prosecutions, she wouldn't answer. She also claimed that she hadn't fired anybody.

Yet since Ms. Pirro became the interim U.S. attorney, three career prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office, including the leader of the Capitol Siege Section, were fired by DOJ. It is hard to believe that she had no knowledge of these terminations.

I am also concerned that Ms. Pirro continues to justify the Trump administration's unlawful actions.

Just days before she became the interim U.S. attorney, she argued that the administration could deport immigrants without due process, claiming that the Fifth Amendment ``says nothing about illegals, so cut the crap . . . .''

As Ms. Pirro knows full well, the Fifth Amendment applies to everyone present in the United States as it states that ``No person . . . shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.''

Ms. Pirro has proven to be a willing accomplice in weaponizing the justice system to protect President Trump's allies and go after his enemies. I urge my colleagues to oppose this nomination.

I announce that the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego) and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego) and the Sentor from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego) and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego) and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), the Senator from Connecticut (Mr.

Murphy), and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

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

Mr. President, the Senator from Wyoming was just on the floor and spoke about the schedule of business here in the U.S. Senate, particularly the question of nominations. Senator Barrasso is my friend. We disagree on a lot of political things, but we respect one another, and I certainly respect him.

There is an important chapter that he just left out of recounting the history of the nominations process in the Senate. I call it the JD Vance chapter.

Listen to this: When Donald Trump was in his first term, he nominated over 90 U.S. attorneys. Every one of them passed with a voice vote, with the possible exception of one in Massachusetts. Every one of these passed with a voice vote. In other words, we didn't require any rollcalls. We filled these vacancies for U.S. attorneys.

Then came Joe Biden. Under the Biden Presidency, a decision was made by one Senator, JD Vance of the State of Ohio. He came along and said: I no longer will allow you--it is my right as a Senator to stop it. I will no longer allow you to have a nominee for U.S. attorney go through without a rollcall.

That sounds like a very minor request, but with potentially over 90 of these rollcalls, we found ourselves backed up in a situation where we couldn't approve any U.S. attorneys. We didn't have the time on the calendar to do it because of the JD Vance requirement.

I came to this floor--this very spot--eight times, pleading with then-Senator JD Vance: Please, don't do this. We have comity and understanding on U.S. attorneys. We did under Trump in his first term, and we certainly did in the early stages of Biden, but now you are requiring rollcall votes on each of the U.S. attorneys, and it is going to create an obstacle to progress on the floor of the Senate. Eight times I came to the floor, asking unanimous consent for Senator Vance to withdraw this demand. He refused each time.

Then he went off to run for Vice President, and while he was gone, running for Vice President, I came to the

floor again and asked the Republicans who were remaining in the Senate Chamber to allow me unanimous consent that nominees for U.S. attorneys will not go through this rollcall process. Unfortunately, a number of now-sitting U.S. Senators on the Republican side came to the floor and objected. They wanted to keep the Vance rule in place. I warned them that the obstacles they were creating under President Biden that were unprecedented and had not been seen under President Trump in his first term would come back to haunt all of us, and now they have.

This requires us to sit down at some point and have an understanding moving forward not just on nominees and whether there are rollcalls on the floor but on fundamental and basic questions as to whether or not a minority position, for example, on an important Agency or council is going to be respected.

What the Trump administration has done, for example, in many places on commissions and in Agencies is to eliminate the Democrats--to fire them from their jobs--and leave vacancies unfilled. Then the Republicans come to us and say: Well, we have Republican nominees for the spots, the Republican spots.

And we say: What about the Democratic nominees?

They say: We are not going to allow you to call any of those.

There has got to be some understanding and comity, and we think that grown-ups should be able to resolve this issue, but the representation of what our problem is this morning did not include those two elements and many others. I hope we can resolve this in a favorable way for the benefit of the American people, but there is a history behind it. Fundamentally, we are in the minority now on the Democratic side, and we don't believe that the rules that the Republicans insist on should be to their benefit only; they should benefit both political parties. Unfortunately, we are in a position where that is not happening.

Mr. President, on a separate issue, with the recess looming, my Republican colleagues are itching to get out of Washington and return to their home States. Why are they so eager? I will tell you. They have some explaining to do. That is why they want to get home. As soon as they get out of Washington, they plan to fan out across the country and try to explain the so-called Big Beautiful Bill of President Trump.

Until then, Senate Republicans are taking to the Senate floor to say good things about this bad bill. This includes the junior Senator from Louisiana, who several times came to the Senate floor claiming that Medicaid spending was not cut in the Big Beautiful Bill.

Sorry. That is false. Let me remind folks this Trump budget bill reduces spending on healthcare programs by $1 trillion. Louisiana is expected to lose $27 billion in Federal Medicaid funding over the next decades alone. It removes 10 million Americans from insurance coverage and threatens hospitals and nursing homes, and he waved away the millions of Americans who will lose their healthcare coverage, writing it off as simply going after double dippers, which has been explained at length by the Senator from Louisiana as people who are ineligible in the first place for receiving medical coverage.

The Senator held up a press release from CMS, the Federal Medicaid Agency, with a splashy, deceiving headline, claiming that 2.8 million Americans are signed up for Medicaid in two different States. Well, if fraud on that scale does exist, then I want to join the effort to put an end to it. Unfortunately, the statement is not accurate. That is not what is happening. The CMS press release provided zero evidence of that claim about massive scale fraud. It is like the President's statement after the State of the Union Address that people 120 years old were drawing Social Security. Not true.

He claimed that stopping duplicated enrollment has the ``potential to save taxpayers approximately $14 billion annually.'' That is a large number. How did they arrive at that conclusion with no report, no findings, and no data underpinning its sensational headline? That was the point. The supposed smoking gun that the junior Senator from Louisiana touted but failed to mention was that, if someone is enrolled in both States, it can be explained in some of the basics, like they moved or that their name was found on two Federal health programs. Fraud? Maybe. They could have lost their job and no longer could pay health premiums, so they enrolled in Medicaid. That is not fraud. Even CMS had the caveat of the word ``potential'' when talking about whether people were actually receiving benefits from two different programs. CMS used ``potential'' again when talking about the cost to taxpayers.

It fits the Republican narrative to tell half the story. It is an effort to cover their tracks when it comes to retroactivity to justify the massive devastation that was caused by the Big Beautiful Bill.

What the junior Senator from Louisiana wants you to believe is that the only way to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid is by passing the single largest healthcare cut in American history. I think he is just wrong. My colleague ignored a warning from the Louisiana Hospital Association and the Louisiana Rural Hospital Coalition, which wrote that cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill will be ``historic in their devastation'' and ``force consolidation of services, staffing reductions, and closures.'' That is the reality in Louisiana of the Big Beautiful Bill.

His fears were echoed in the trip I took last weekend to southern Illinois, to Springfield. Doctors and nurses there warned that Medicaid cuts will force rural-based providers to scale back services and push patients into overcrowded emergency rooms, straining the entire system.

I heard the same story at Roseland Community Hospital in Chicago, which relies on Medicaid for 63 percent of their patients. A hospital that has served its community for 100 years is facing what the CEO said was a ``game over'' situation.

To the junior Senator from Louisiana who believes this budget bill is merely stopping cheaters from enrolling in Medicaid, he can sing that tune to 33 rural hospitals in his home State which are now at risk of closing. That is what this awful bill does.

You might be wondering: What are we going to do with the $1 trillion in healthcare cut money? It is going to go to tax cuts for billionaires. Goodness gracious. Give Elon Musk a $250,000 tax cut, and I am sorry to say he won't even notice it. That is the reality. But these hospitals, particularly rural hospitals, will notice it, and many of them will be forced to close. The same thing will be true for nursing homes, which provide valuable, lifesaving services to senior citizens. They face cutbacks because of the Big Beautiful Bill, and families are going to have to sacrifice as a result.

While in Ohio, Vice President Vance said: ``If that Big, Beautiful Bill hadn't passed, you all would have gotten a tax increase to the tune of thousands of dollars,'' and ``we happen to believe that you all work very hard for your money. You ought to keep it.''

A great sentiment, but it is not true. The truth is that working families will see more of their hard-earned money gone for higher personal healthcare costs. Hang on tight. The cost of health insurance premiums and the cost of healthcare itself is going to continue to increase, at the expense of American families. We estimate they will lose $2,400 a year.

What is the tax break that comes out of the Big Beautiful Bill? If you are making $35,000 or less in annual income, $13 a month--$13 a month versus $2,400 a year. Do the math. Working families will be the losers in that respect.

Coupled with the costs of losing healthcare coverage, grocery benefits, and higher prices on clothing, prescriptions, and groceries due to tariffs, that translates into huge losses for working families.

The Vice President says you ``ought to keep'' your hard-earned money, but the Republican bill only gives crumbs to working Americans. So while millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations rake in the dough, working families are left with scraps. And Donald Trump, JD Vance, and congressional Republicans are hoping you don't notice.

I also want to take a moment to discuss the energy provisions in this bill.

In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act unleashed billions of dollars in investments in solar and clean energy projects, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs with it--primarily in red districts. But that didn't matter to congressional Republicans who voted to dismantle the law's tax credits for wind, solar, and electric cars.

More than $22 billion worth of clean energy projects have now been canceled this year, and with those cancellations, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost and energy bills will shoot up. But upon the bill's passage, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said:

The One Big Beautiful Bill . . . will restore energy independence and make life more affordable for American families.

That is false: the bill kneecaps wind and solar energy--the fastest- growing sources of clean, cheap power. And our working families will pay the price--literally.

Illinois residents will see their electric bills rise as much as $400 annually, thanks to this bill. So much for those tax breaks.

So while this administration and their lackeys preach the supposed benefits of this bill, Democrats will be there to push back and remind the public what this bill really does. And we Democrats will remind these reeling communities who allowed this to happen: Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Republicans in Congress.

I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from Illinois (Ms. Duckworth), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Illinois (Ms. Duckworth), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego) and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Gallego) and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch) are necessarily absent.