Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. MURPHY. So there is also a third agenda here. We were not necessarily both here at this time, but a few Republican administrations ago, there was an attempt to privatize Social Security, to take, you know, the corpus and move that money into the hands of the private sector for them to manage the money and, of course, charge a fee or a commission for the management of the money. The Social Security trust fund, if sort of fully handed over to investors on Wall Street, could make a lot of money for that industry. The American people rose up against that. It was stopped in its tracks. But that is still a priority for a lot of allies of the President, to get their hands on that money inside Social Security. And, again, I am previewing a future conversation, but I keep on making the analogy to what is happening inside the education space because those same industries--whether it was the investment banks or private-equity firms--get wide-eyed at our public education dollars as well because they would love to get their hands on those public education dollars and have private equity companies running our elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools and skimming a little bit of money off the top to pay back their investors. And so, you know, the other potential agenda here is to attack the public administration of Social Security, attack the public administration of our public schools in order to shift that administration--and the oversight of the investments in the case of the Social Security--to the private sector so that the President can hand those functions and that oversight to friends in the private sector. And, once again, it just becomes a money-making vehicle for folks who are already doing very well instead of an exercise in just trying to promote governance. Instead of the agenda simply being the education of our kids or the administration of a benefit program, it just becomes about making somebody else money. I pose that as a question to my friend because we saw this attempt to try to privatize Social Security, and you can certainly see at the end of this assault, this false assault on the inefficiency of the public administration, the solution being to turn the program over to the private sector, the privatization of Social Security that many Republicans have wanted for a long time finally coming to fruition.

Mr. MURPHY. Ready, fire, aim.

Mr. MURPHY. You lived in Connecticut.

Mr. MURPHY. Senator Booker, I am going to pose to you a pretty simple question here, but, first, let me lay down a little bit of a predicate. You know, we have heard already some talk tonight about this extraordinary statement, but not terribly surprising, from the Secretary of Commerce, who is a close friend of the President, somebody who is very close to all of the decisions being made in the White House, where he said, you know, that if a Social Security recipient misses their check for a month, then they should not complain. My mother-in-law wouldn't complain. That is easy for him to say, you know, maybe you wouldn't complain if your son-in-law was a billionaire. You probably are not going to be harmed by missing a Social Security check if you have got a billionaire in the family. But 99.99 percent of Americans do not have a billionaire that they can get on the phone if they miss a month, and 1 month's Social Security check disappearing is a cataclysm for a lot of families. As I was listening to you, I just did a little bit of, you know, easy, back-of- the-napkin math. So the average Social Security check, on a monthly basis, in this country is somewhere around $2,000. Obviously, it varies based on how much money you put in and what your income was, but, on average, it is about $2,000. Now, some Americans have supplemental retirement income, but fewer and fewer do today because it is just not the case any longer that employers are going to provide for you a defined benefit plan. So if you were working minimum wage your entire life or if you were working a low-wage job, you are not going to have money to put away in Social Security. I remember during one of my walks across the State of Connecticut, spending about half an hour walking with an elderly gentleman in Willimantic, CT, and he told me a story that is not atypical. He worked his entire life. Most of his adult life he worked for Walmart. He was really proud of working for Walmart. He helped a whole bunch of people in his community. He was working for a great American company, a company he was proud of. He was helping people every single day that lived in his neighborhood get what they needed when they came into the store. But you know the wage he was making at Walmart. He was making very little, and they didn't have any defined benefit plan. They would let him save a little bit of money if he could find the means, but he couldn't because every single dime that he made from Walmart had to go to rent and groceries and medicine and cell phone bill and transportation. And so he worked for 20 years at Walmart, and when he retired, do you know how much he had in savings? Zero. Zero. And he felt like he had done everything people had asked him for. He worked for a great American company. He helped people. He worked full time. He didn't miss time. He didn't goof around. And when he retired, he had nothing--nothing--saved. So the Social Security check, which to him was probably about $2,000 a month, was everything he had. And he is walking with me explaining to me what his life is like today. He was coming out of the liquor store, and that was one of the things he did every day was go down to the liquor store and, you know, buy a nip or two and, you know, just pass a couple hours. He didn't like to spend a lot of time in his house because he has roommates. He lives in a small apartment with two other guys, strangers. He doesn't know them. And he says to me as we are walking: This is not how I expected my life to go. I thought if I worked my entire life and I played by the rules and I worked hard, you know, I would have a little bit more dignified retirement than this. I share a room with two other guys that I don't know. And that is the reality for a lot of Americans. That is the reality for a lot of retirees. You know, $2,000 is the average Social Security check. I don't know why I picked Tallahassee, but I just picked Tallahassee. I said what is the average one-bedroom rent in Tallahassee? It is $1,200, utilities are probably a couple hundred dollars, the average senior citizen spends $500 a month on food. Rent, utilities, food, that is it. That is your $2,000. You have nothing left if you are 1 of the 7 million Americans who rely only on Social Security like my friend from Willimantic. You have nothing left for medicine, for transportation. You have got nothing left for a cell phone. You have nothing left to go to the movies once a month. You have nothing left for presents for your grandkids for Christmas or for their birthday. If you are relying on Social Security--and many people who have worked their entire life are--you go without that check for 1 month, your whole life falls apart. And so this ``cavalierness'' that Musk and Trump have about Social Security, that the billionaires that advise them have about Social Security: Don't worry about it if you miss a check for a month or 2 months. You are a fraudster. You are trying to defraud the government if you complain about missing a Social Security check. It is so disconnected from reality. I know we are going to talk later today about the plans to shut down the Department of Education. It shows this similar disdain for public education, the way that they are showing a disdain for working Americans who are relying on Social Security as their primary means of retirement income, the disdain for the 40 million working Americans who rely on Medicaid. And it is not hard to understand why, because if you are a billionaire, if you are Elon Musk, if you are Donald Trump, you don't have to rely on the public school system. Your kids go to fancy private schools. You will never need to rely on Medicaid. You have lived fortunate lives--in Donald Trump's case because he was born into wealth. You will get a Social Security check, but that is not going to be your primary retirement. And so you can understand, if you put a bunch of billionaires in charge of the government who don't lead lives that are remotely connected to how average people live, they will say things like Social Security is just one big Ponzi scheme, and that is the big one to eliminate or, you know what, America will be all right if we impose $880 billion in cuts to the insurance program for 24 percent of Americans or let's shut down the Department of Education because, I don't know, public education doesn't matter to me. So I think it is just the reality that we are living in today in which we have people who are making these decisions who just don't understand how normal people's lives work and, in particular, how a person's life falls apart if they have any diminution in their Social Security income, when the average check is $2,000 a month and the average expenses in most cities for a senior citizen who relies on Social Security are going to be far higher than $2,000 a month. Here is my question for you. You laid out what is going on with Social Security today. It is like the opposite of efficiency. It is called the Department of Government Efficiency. And what we know for certain in the Social Security system is that everything they are doing has the intent of making the system less efficient, right? You don't just close dozens of offices and shut down the phone system to make the system more efficient. You do that to make the system less efficient. And so I am trying to figure out why, right? I am trying to figure out why. And I will give you, you know, two theories and then let you tell me if you think I am right or I am wrong. It could be a pretext to eradicate the whole system. What did they say about USAID? They said that USAID was a corrupt enterprise. It was corrupt. No evidence of corruption in USAID. No evidence of corruption, no allegations of specific corruption, but they just made these accusations that USAID was criminal. Musk and Trump said this: It is a criminal enterprise. It is a corrupt enterprise. And that became their justification to eliminate it. Within weeks, USAID, one of the most important vehicles of U.S. national security was gone-- was gone. They didn't run on that. Nobody saw that coming. It was 2 weeks of allegations about criminality and corruption, and then USAID vanished. And people were like looking around, what happened? They didn't tell us they were going to do that, and now it is gone. They certainly didn't run on eliminating Social Security or cutting people's benefits. But, boy, the playbook seems a little familiar here that all of a sudden there are these lies being told. Lies being told. Let's say what it is about the corruption inside Social Security. As you said, the improper benefit payments are minuscule, right, .3 percent of overall payments. And so is this a pretext to ultimately make big cuts in Social Security or, alternatively, is it just part of a plan to just sort of put the entire country on edge, right? To just make everybody wake up in the morning wondering whether they are next, right? Is it my Medicaid benefit that is going to be cut? Is Social Security going to be there for me if I am a Federal employee? You know, is my job here next week? And is that a means of distracting you from the corruption, the thievery that is happening at the highest levels of government? Is that in service of an agenda to try to convert this country from democracy to something else, if everybody is just so focused on the next hit, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, my son losing his Federal job? Is that a means to ultimately try to drive an agenda through the back door while people are looking at the threats coming at them through the front door? It is clearly not about efficiency. I mean, that is what we know. The changes they are making to Social Security are not about efficiency, so the question is, What is the agenda here if it is not efficiency?

Mr. MURPHY. Does the Senator yield?

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator. What the Senator is outlining is an extraordinary assault not just on education but on the knowledge economy. I want to bring manufacturing jobs back to this country, but I understand--I think everybody understands--that we are not going to be a nation filled with low-skilled manufacturing jobs. We are going to be a nation that does high-skilled manufacturing. We are going to be a nation that invents things. We are going to be a nation that is dependent on engineering and on invention. We are going to be a knowledge economy. We are today, but we are going to be even more reliant on maintaining and expanding our knowledge edge on the rest of the world, given the fact that the pace of change and the oncoming transformation that will come from robotics and AI will make it even more important for a nation to have the most highly skilled, most highly educated workforce possible in order to stay ahead of the curve and not have employment be buried by automation and artificial intelligence. So this is a moment in which we should be doubling down on our support for the knowledge economy, on an integration of public sector research and private sector research, which has always been the genius of American economy. We did that integration better than anybody, and it is not coincidental that we leap-frogged the rest of the world when it came to that innovation economy. But what the Senator is explaining is that the Trump administration is waging a war on the knowledge economy. It is literally signing our economic death warrant by coming after the foundational strength of our Nation, which is that public-private sector integration. I just checked in with the University of Connecticut, which is going to lose $165 million because of this illegal change that the Trump administration has implemented, dramatically cutting the amount of research dollars that go to institutions with NIH grants. I will just read half their list. They gave me a list of all their research projects that are going to either be eliminated or slowed for diminished: A project for improving physical and cognitive function in aging; a project for improving outcomes for people with autism; a project for understanding neural mechanisms for language and reading, including people with dyslexia; funding for prevention and care for HIV patients; projects for studying the leading causes of death and disability in the United States, including cancer, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, and substance abuse; projects studying treatments for rare diseases and genetic disorders with specific impacts on health, including sickle cell, mitochondrial disorders, Rett syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, muscle and bone regeneration research, tick-borne diseases. The University of Connecticut faces the same crisis as all the other institutions listed in that incredibly long STAT news article. And as you mentioned, research is not going to wait around for this crisis to pass. They are going to accept offers from research institutions in other countries, from our European allies to our Asian competitors. We are going to lose our competitive edge when it comes to research. It is worth noting that this change in research funding is illegal. Article I vests the spending power of the Federal Government in Congress. That is plain and simple, and there are lots of good reasons why our Founding Fathers did that, Senator Booker. They were determined to keep the spending power out of the hands of the executive branch because they had seen how the British King used the Treasury in order to compel loyalty and to punish opposition: You get money if you are loyal to me. You get money if you are loyal to me; I withhold money from you if you are disloyal to me. And so Congress got the spending power. We decided the exact rate of reimbursement for medical research. We were very specific about it in the statute that we passed, Republicans and Democrats. This cut in funding for institutes of higher educations' research that has been implemented by the administration is illegal on its face. Congress said exactly how research funding should be allocated; the President is ignoring that statute and implementing a unilateral cut. It has been enjoined by the Federal court. Hopefully, if the courts follow the law, it will be permanently stopped. But it is important to note that it stands in a larger context of the Federal Government using its spending power--excuse me--the Trump administration trying to seize control of Federal spending in order to do that work that our Founding Fathers were so worried about. We have seen over the past several weeks the administration march through school after school, trying to cut individual deals with institutions of higher education. We will release your funding only after you sign a bilateral agreement with the administration lining your institute of higher education's priorities up with the political interests of the administration. This is exactly what our Founding Fathers were trying to avoid: the Executive using the spending power to compel loyalty from individuals and institutions. What they are doing is illegal. And it is beyond me why my Republican colleagues, our Republican colleagues, stand idly by while the spending power vested in Congress by the Constitution is ripped from us. But, Senator Booker, I guess I am going to ask you the same question I did when it came to this assault on Social Security, and it is a simple question. And I will lay out a little bit of a predicate. The question is: Why? What the administration has done is extraordinary, proposing to close the Department of Education--wildly unpopular. Nobody is asking for that--waging this illegal and unconstitutional assault on our knowledge economy, suspending funding for institutions of higher education, research budgets, when, plainly, the statute says they cannot do that. So why engage in this extraordinary action to essentially destroy America's knowledge economy from elementary school all the way up to graduate education? Well, as we have talked about, as you laid out, it can't be because you are trying to help the economy. This destroys the economy. I mean, this is the worst thing that you could probably do for the economy is to wage this open, transparent, proudful assault on research because we will not survive as an economy unless we are the place where cutting- edge research and invention happens. We just won't. And so researchers now, who are having all of their offers suspended by major colleges and universities, they are looking elsewhere. Maybe they are hoping that the offer still comes through, but they are dialing up other competitors, many of them outside of the United States. There was a story out of the University of Cambridge in England a couple weeks ago in which their administrators were talking about the bounty that they are receiving as some of the highest class researchers in the world are coming to them because they don't believe that they will have any source of stable funding from the United States.

Mr. MURPHY. So it can't be about helping us create jobs or supporting our economy. This is, no doubt, an assault on the economy. One of the complaints that I hear often about elementary and secondary education is that the Department of Education was engaged in micromanagement, right? That it was a Federal school board, and we want to get the Federal Government out of the business of dictating what local schools will do. Well, that is not a credible explanation for what is happening because, in fact, the Trump administration is telegraphing that they are going to actually jump into the micromanagement of our local schools. Nobody has any idea what ``DEI'' means. Let's just be honest. It means something different to every single official in the Trump administration. It is just a proxy to impose a set of reactionary, rightwing values on our schools or on our Federal Agencies. I asked a question of the nominee to be the alleged last Secretary of Education as to whether or not African-American history could be taught in our high schools any longer, and her answer was essentially maybe not. I don't know, but DEI might mean that you can't teach African- American history. It might mean that the Federal Government is going to comb through every syllabus in every high school in the entire country and tell you what courses you can teach and what courses you can't. And if there are any words in there that our AI algorithm doesn't like-- like ``African''--can't teach it. That is a level of micromanagement never seen before in the Federal Government. And so the reason that they are cracking down on the Department of Education or eliminating funding for research is not because they are trying to get the Federal Government out of the management of our schools, because they are doing exactly the opposite. They are telling you that your school is not going to be able to make decisions on what classes it offers its students. It is going to be Linda McMahon, the former CEO of the World Wrestling Federation, that is going to be in charge of whether your school can teach African-American history. OK? So then what is the reason, Senator Booker? And I will, you know, just give you a couple suggestions: Well, maybe it is just to compel loyalty, right? Maybe it is just to use that money to compel loyalty so that boards of education or colleges are only teaching conservative or right-leaning curriculum. Maybe it is to try to quell protests on campuses so that there isn't an ability for students to robustly protest the policies of the regime. Maybe it is just to destroy the idea of objective truth. I mean, this whole scandal over Signal has lots of elements to it, but I think one of the most worrying things for the American public, why it is still a story a week later, is because the Secretary of Defense looked the American public in the eye and said: 2 plus 2 equals 9. Right? He said: Those Signal texts you saw did not involve war plans, did not involve classified information. The American public was like: Wait a second. We read them. I am not dumb. I know those were war plans. I know that that was classified information. But if you are in the business of trying to unwind democracy, you have to destroy objective truth. You have to make everything political. You have to make everything subjective. Where is objective truth midwifed? It is in our education system. That is where we learn 2 plus 2 equals 4 every time. But if you want to undermine the foundation of a democracy, then you undermine the place where truth happens.

Mr. MURPHY. OK. Maybe it is the same agenda with Social Security, just come up with an excuse to privatize it all. Just take all the money that is going to good, public sector research and just move it all into the private sector so it can be a source to reward the friends of President Trump. That could be a rationale as well. Or maybe it is even simpler. Maybe it is just to own the libs. Maybe it is just that, historically, Democrats on the left have maybe talked about education more than Republicans have, even though, to me, it was always something we both cared about. Whether or not I agree with George Bush's ``No Child Left Behind'' plan, at least he was walking into the Capitol with a plan to try to improve education. But maybe it is just that Democrats on the left have historically talked more about education. And if you believe, as Donald Trump does, that all politics is zero sum, anything the Democrats are for must be, by definition, bad for America. And Democrats seem to like college, and they seem to really support our schools, so we have to destroy our colleges, and we have to destroy public education. Because if the left is for it, it must be evil. Maybe that is the reason they are doing it. But that is the question I pose to you because it has nothing to do with our economy. It has nothing to do with getting the Federal Government out of the management of schools and colleges. There is another agenda here, and it doesn't seem to be an agenda that squares with anything that the American people have been asking, Senator Booker.

Mr. MURPHY. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. MURPHY. I take the Senator's point, my friend's point. I am probing tonight for the why because it is the obvious question. It doesn't make sense, right? On its face, this intentional chaos--this intentional chaos in Social Security, in Medicare, in higher education, it doesn't make sense. It is not about efficiency. It is not about jobs. So what is it about? But your point is a good one. That may not actually be the conversation that a lot of apolitical Americans are asking. They may just be looking at this on the face and say: How does this impact me? It doesn't matter to me why it is happening; it matters how it is going to impact me. There is no doubt that this assault on higher education has none; it does. We are, as you said it better than I have, we are just in a race.

Mr. MURPHY. We are just in a race, and we just decided to slow down to a walk, which is a shame because we are fast. We are fast. This country is quick. And our coach just told us, start walking while the other guys speed up. This is why we have urgency because the race--this one is not. Maybe it is a marathon. But it is one of those races where if the other team gets too big a lead, it is going to be hard to catch up. So in the next 3\1/2\ years, if we just stand down in terms of supporting the knowledge economy, we are going to shed millions of jobs--millions of jobs. And once those centers of excellence, research excellence are outside the United States, it is not like the next President can just come back in and fix it. That becomes a permanent liability for us. The reason that I am here on the floor with you, Senator Booker, is because I agree with you that this is not normal. But I also agree with you that we have to wake our colleagues up fast because like a second ago, I thought we all agreed on the fact that we need to support the knowledge economy. Like 2 seconds ago, we were all raising hands together, Republicans and Democrats, that we finally started putting big new dollars into NIH. We did a $2 billion increase, I think, a few years ago, and it was a big bipartisan achievement. And all of a sudden, just because Donald Trump is in the White House, we have lost the bipartisan consensus of the knowledge economy.

Mr. MURPHY. I am good. I made my point.

Mr. MURPHY. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. MURPHY. Those are hard stories to read, Senator Booker, but I appreciate your showing the coldness of this current administration's immigration policy. The tragedy to me is that there is an opportunity to fix what is, undoubtedly, a broken immigration system, and yet we are into day 71 and Donald Trump has not proposed to us any proposals to fix the broken system. Instead what he is doing is spending like a drunken sailor on an enforcement system that wastes tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. You described this harrowing experience that this Canadian woman had, and as I was listening to this 2-week ordeal that she went through, being transported from site to site, being processed and reprocessed, as the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Subcommittee of Appropriations, I am just cataloging in my brain how much money that cost us. Ultimately, this was somebody working in the United States, this was somebody that posed no threat to the U.S. citizens, but we probably spent several million dollars on that 2-week ordeal. Overall, the Trump administration is going to blow through all of the money allocated to Border Patrol. They are going to have to come back to Congress for a massive additional appropriation, all at the same time that they are shuttering medical research in this country; they are closing down Social Security offices. There are measles outbreaks all across the country. Planes seem to be falling out of the sky as the FAA is enduring layoffs. There are consequences to these spending decisions. The amount of money that is being spent at the border, much of it wasted in a showy, ineffective response, the consequence of that is that the services that the average, everyday Americans need, like help on their Social Security claims, are being impacted. But we need to fix the broken immigration system, and we had an opportunity to do that last year when Republicans and Democrats came together and wrote a bipartisan border security bill that, frankly, would have allocated tens of billions of additional dollars that would have fixed our broken asylum system, would have given the President new authorities, and Donald Trump instructed all the Republicans in this Chamber to oppose it. In the end, I think four Senators, including the author, Senator Lankford, supported it, but every other Republican here opposed it. And the reason Donald Trump told them to oppose it was that he would fix it when he became President. But we are now in day 72, and there has not been a single proposal from Donald Trump to fix the broken immigration system, just a whole bunch of spending, essentially money down the drain because the system itself needs to be reformed. And so it speaks to my confident belief that Donald Trump does not want to fix our immigration system. He wants to keep this issue open as a sore in our politics. If I were wrong, he would have proposed legislation here to deal with the underlying inefficiency of the system, instead of just throwing money at the problem. And so we will see what the result of this campaign is. We were told that immigrants to this country represented a very specific national security threat; that we needed to crack down on immigration, including expelling from this country legitimate asylum seekers because that was what was necessary to protect the Nation. Well, we will see what the crime data tells us for the first few months of this administration. I have a feeling I already know what the story is; crime is not going to have gone down. Why? Because, in fact, whether people want to acknowledge this or not, natural-born American citizens commit crimes at rates higher than first-generation immigrants or people born outside of the United States of America. But Senator Booker, I guess the question I want to ask you is this: I think you and I agree that Americans right, left, and center acknowledge that the immigration system is broken. They didn't love it when they saw thousands of people crossing on an average day. And they know that when it takes 10 years to process an asylum claim, something is wrong, and that it then just provides incentive for people to come here without documentation. But my impression is that the cross section of Americans that believes that the existing immigration system is broken also believes three other things: One, that the way to fix it is to change the laws, and they believe that we have not done our job until we have changed the laws; for instance, building a better asylum system. And once again, not a single proposal from the Trump administration on how to fix our broken immigration system, not a single proposal. Second, I believe that they understand that immigration is a core strength of this Nation, not a liability, and that if we want to thrive as an economy, we are going to have to bring people to this country legally. But to turn our backs on immigration as a mechanism to grow economically, that is not in line with what Americans believe, even those that think the existing system is broken. And then, lastly, I just don't believe this country is as mean as Donald Trump thinks it is.

Mr. MURPHY. I get it that everybody wants this Nation to be a nation of laws, but when an American citizen looks at a child with a medical condition, when an American citizen looks at an individual who will face certain death from a drug gang if they stay in their home country, when they look at individuals in war-torn nations overseas, they believe that America is strong enough, is big enough, is generous enough to be able to protect those people from harm. Why? Because that is what America always has been. And so this idea that President Trump has that Americans are mean and spiteful and don't want to help people just because they were born outside of the United States or their parents were born outside of the United States, I just don't think that is right. It obviously betrays the best traditions of this Nation, but I think it also fundamentally misreads the American people. So I think people want our immigration to be fixed, the system to be fixed, but I think they want us to do it. They understand the laws are broken. They do not want to abandon America's tradition of bringing people here from all around the world. They understand that our economy and our economic prosperity is linked to our ability to bring hard-working immigrants to this country, and they are just not as mean as Donald Trump thinks they are.

Mr. MURPHY. Can the Senator yield?

Mr. MURPHY. I just want to drill down on this for a moment. It gets back to a theme that you have been hitting on throughout the evening and early morning, and that is that not everything has to be zero-sum politics. This is part of what is so exhausting about the last 71 days for many, many Americans. I think it is part of why Donald Trump's approval ratings are tanking by the day. You and I are pugilists when we need to be, right? We fight when we think that there is a worthy fight. That is what this is today--it is a fight. We understand it is a fight for our values. But we don't think everything has to be a fight. We see our jobs as standing up for our convictions but then finding that common ground. I did not expect to be in that room with Senator Lankford. I was surprised, pleasantly, when we came to an agreement. You spent months and months hammering out really difficult criminal justice reform with a colleague of yours that you have equal numbers of disagreements with because we feel like we have a call from our constituents to fight but then find the common ground. But this administration has zero interest in common ground. Every single day, they wake up thinking only about conflict, thinking only about defeat of their opposition. And they have been frustrated because they have been trying to do a lot of illegal things, and the courts have been telling them no. They are now talking about extraordinary measures, like impeaching judges or defunding the courts. Instead, they could reach out to Democrats. They could decide to do what every previous President has tried to do, which is, instead of ramming through a one-side-only policy on immigration, for instance, come to people of good will on the opposing party and try to work out a compromise. This is what exhausts the American people, is this administration's complete and total unwillingness to find common ground on anything. That is not where the center of this country is. On the issues of immigration, we found common ground last year. It was hard. It did not satisfy everyone. But we have proven that on this issue--it is hot. It is difficult for even family members to talk about it sometimes. Even on this issue of immigration, we can find that common ground. So we are here--you are here because there is a fight to be waged, but I think we both wish on a litany of these topics that we were instead sitting down with our colleagues. But that is just not in the DNA of this administration. That is part of why this President is becoming more and more unpopular by the day, is because they expect any President--any President--to make at least a minimalist effort to try to reach out and find compromise, and that never happens from the Trump administration.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. MURPHY. Senator Booker, first of all, I want to express my gratitude to you for recognizing the gravity of this moment. Your ability to see that we are facing a series of threats that are not normal--a series of threats to families, to children, to individuals, threats to our democracy, threats to our rule of law--I think it is really important. And you have endeavored to do something extraordinary here, to stand on your feet for as long as you can to convey both to our colleagues and to the public that because these are not normal times, what is required of us is something different than a normal response. And I know maybe we have extended the amount of time that you had planned to talk on this particular topic of the threat to Americans' healthcare, but I don't know that there is anything more important that we are talking about today in the U.S. Senate because the scope of what Republicans are talking about here is absolutely extraordinary. And I want to lay out for you, you know, a few additional facts and numbers and ask you to respond to them as you wrap up your time talking about this particular topic. But let me just underscore what you have laid out very well. We are talking about nearly $900 billion worth of cuts to Medicaid in order to pay for about a trillion dollars' worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. There will be table scraps in the Republican bill for middle-class consumers and families, but the bulk of the tax cuts are going to the very, very wealthy--millionaires and billionaires; frankly, people who have done tremendously well in this country over the past several decades, who are not in need of more. And so you were very right to point out the immorality of the 2017 attempt to cut the Affordable Care Act, which insured 20 million Americans. But Medicaid covers 70 to 80 million Americans, and the new wrinkle is that this proposal doesn't just cut healthcare for tens of millions of Americans; estimates are that it could be 30 million Americans that lose healthcare under the Republican proposal. No, this is even more difficult to swallow for the American public than the 2017 attempt to cut and eliminate the Affordable Care Act because this measure is a direct transfer of money from the poor, the middle class, the people who are on Medicaid to the very, very wealthy. Frankly, it could turn out to be the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of the country from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy, which is why, I think, you are taking this extraordinary step to make sure that our colleagues and the American people know the gravity of this moment. A lot of Republicans all across the country are not doing townhalls any longer; they are not meeting in person with their constituents. And so there are a lot of Americans that are going to be in the dark that have a lot of questions, have a lot of questions about what is happening here, about why it is necessary to cut a program like Medicaid--that insures 24 percent of Americans--to the bone in order to finance a tax cut for the very, very wealthy. One of the things I just wanted to set up for you here is, you know, just to note that Americans may be surprised to know that 24 percent of Americans are actually on Medicaid today, because some Americans may say: Well, my insurance isn't Medicaid. My insurance is through MississippiCAN. My insurance is through ACCESSNebraska. My insurance is through Centennial Care. Or in Connecticut, my insurance is through HUSKY Health. In New Jersey, it is New Jersey Family Care, right? So Medicaid normally isn't called Medicaid; it is called something different in every State. So it is important for you to understand that so many of your neighbors are on Medicaid even though it may not be called Medicaid in your State. That is how we get to 24 percent of American families on this particular program. The Joint Economic Committee, which is a committee of Congress, did a study, issued a report, talking about how many people would lose their healthcare insurance on a State-by-State basis if this $880 billion cut to Medicaid went through. I won't go through the whole list, Senator Booker, but I just pulled out some States that are represented by our Republican colleagues. In Alabama, 20 percent of Alabamans are on their Medicaid Program. In total, 330,000 people in one State--Alabama--would lose their healthcare if this cut went through. In Arkansas, 25 percent of families are on the Arkansas Medicaid Program. A quarter of a million people would lose their health insurance. In Florida, 17 percent of the State is on Medicaid, and 1.3 million Floridians could lose their healthcare because of these Medicaid cuts. We can just go on and on. Twenty percent of Iowans are on the Medicaid Program, 20 percent of Indiana residents, and 25 percent of Kentucky residents. Thirty percent of Louisianans are on their State's Medicaid Program, and 500,000 residents of Louisiana could lose their healthcare. Some of that would happen in a sort of slow-moving catastrophe, but, as you pointed out, Senator Booker, a lot of that would happen immediately because many of the States that have taken advantage of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion have a built-in clause to their State's law that says that the minute the reimbursement rate declines, even if it declines by only a few percentage points, the entirety of the Medicaid expansion program is eliminated. So, overnight, you will have millions of people who would lose their healthcare insurance. But, as you have rightly pointed out, that is just the beginning of the disaster because there are hundreds of rural hospitals in this country that are right now living on the brink of disaster. If Medicaid reimbursements drop by just 5 or 10 percent, those rural hospitals are out of business. The same can be said of thousands of drug treatment centers in this country, addiction treatment centers. So you are ultimately talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of hospitals and health centers closing and millions of Americans losing their healthcare insurance. And for what? And for what? To be able to hoard a bunch of money so that the richest Americans can buy a third vacation home? So that millionaires can double their landscaping budget? Who is asking for this in America today? Of course there is a conversation to be had about efficiency in our healthcare programs, but none of that conversation is happening here. If it was, you wouldn't be reading the letters of all of these associations representing healthcare groups predicting disaster; they would actually be in the room at the table. If you really wanted to save money, you would actually put the doctors and the hospitals and the medical providers who know something about the system in a room, but instead this is a political decision that has been made to cut a certain amount of money that does not coincidentally line up to the amount of money that the Republican budget bill wants to give in tax cuts to the very, very wealthy. So you, I think, rightly put emphasis on and drew attention to John McCain's decision--and, of course, we should always give credit to Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who also voted no in 2017 on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act bill--because it is just a reminder that you are under no obligation as a U.S. Senator to do the wrong thing if you know what the right thing is. You work so hard to get this job, spend your entire life working to become somebody who can make important decisions like we can in the U.S. Senate, and you are under no obligation to outsource your decision making to the President of the United States or your party leadership. Everybody here gets to make an independent decision on what is right or wrong, and this just feels plain wrong--a thoughtless, unplanned, massive cut in Medicaid that is going to throw millions of people off their healthcare in order to finance a tax cut, the majority of which is going to go to people who don't need it. Every Senator here can make up their own mind as to whether that is the right thing or the wrong thing to do for this country. The exercise that you are engaged in, Senator Booker, is a simple one: just trying to make sure that all the facts are on the table. That last segment you did on the impact on medical research should be reason alone for folks to reconsider the path this administration is taking. But the Medicaid cuts as a mechanism to further enrich those that are already plenty rich--man, I just don't imagine that is anything the American public are clamoring for. So, Senator Booker, I just wanted to really thank you for standing up and making this moment possible. I want to leave you with just two stories on this topic that have come into my office and then ask you a question. This is all lead-up to a question. So I have a constituent who was paralyzed about a decade ago, and he now uses a wheelchair, and the only insurance program that can provide him with what he needs from a mechanical and technological standpoint, plus the drugs he needs to survive, is Medicaid. It is his only option. It is his only option. He can't work. He is paralyzed. Medicaid is his only option. For him and for millions of others, Medicaid is life or death. It is just life or death. If you are talking about cutting Medicaid by as much as 20 percent-- that is what we are talking about here today. An $880 billion cut in Medicaid represents about 10 percent of the overall program, but you have to assume that States are not going to continue to match if the Federal Government isn't putting in their share. So that 10-percent cut could very quickly become something closer to a 20-percent cut. There is no way that you can cut the Medicaid Program by 20 percent without it impacting people like my constituent in a wheelchair who comes to many of my events when we protest these Medicaid cuts. This is life or death for many Americans. But that is not the full extent of the horror that will happen. I was just reading a letter the other day from an 80-year-old constituent of mine who lives at home with his wife, but his wife is very frail, and it is Medicaid and Connecticut's Medicaid waiver that allow for her to receive in-home healthcare services. He is panicked. He wants to spend the final years of his life with his wife. He knows that if Medicaid gets cut even on the margins, that Medicaid waiver likely is gone, and either his wife will pass or she will have to be in an institution. Query whether that institution will even be able to give her a place because two-thirds of nursing home beds in this country are paid for by Medicaid. So one way or the other, he is staring separation from his wife in the eye. She either doesn't make it without the Medicaid reimbursement that gives her the services at home or she is forced to go to an institution, and they live separately for their final days. This is the reality facing people who rely on Medicaid, whether you are disabled or elderly. This is the reality that will be imposed on millions of Americans in order to finance a tax cut for the wealthy. The scope of this is just enormous, Senator Booker. So I guess this is the question I wanted to ask you. You and I have been in government for a long time. We have served in a variety of different capacities. I don't think this country is really ready for the scope of the healthcare cataclysm that could come with a trillion-dollar cut to the health insurance program that is responsible for the care of one- quarter of Americans, two-thirds of nursing home beds, and the budgets of literally tens of thousands of vital healthcare institutions in this country. Nobody is better than you at conveying the moral consequences of the decisions we make here. Just share with us for a minute, as you sort of wrap up a conversation on this topic of the healthcare priorities of the Trump administration and the Republican Congress, what America may look like in a world where we have decided to gut the health insurance program of last resort for the most vulnerable Americans and the health insurance program that insures 24 million Americans, two-thirds of whom are working for a living. Just give us a little bit of a sense of the enormity of the consequence that this ultimately would bring to this country.

Mr. MURPHY. I did.

Mr. MURPHY. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. MURPHY. There is so much similarity between the debate that you are forcing this Senate to have tonight and the debate that we were having back in 2016 on this epidemic of gun violence. I would describe it this way. The only thing that matters, the thing that matters more than anything else in your life is protecting your loved ones from physical harm.

Mr. MURPHY. You would give anything, right? Anything. You would give your life savings, your house. You would perhaps give your own life in order to protect your child or your brother or sister or mother or father from physical harm. So when you and I have sat across from the victims of gun violence, many of whom live in your neighborhood and my neighborhood, in Newark and Hartford, we are looking at a kind of desperation and sorrow that is unique--that is unique that also comes with not just losing a loved one to gun violence but feeling powerless in that exercise.

Mr. MURPHY. Feeling like there was nothing you could do and watching your elected leader stand by and allow for this reality to continue to occur in your neighborhood, where kids are being shot down in cold blood and your elected leaders--the adults in charge of your community--are standing idly by. That is not fundamentally different than the reality that will be visited upon millions of families if this size of a cut in Medicaid funding goes into effect because families out there who rely on Medicaid to keep alive their son or daughter who has a complicated medical disease have no other quarter, have no other last resort besides Medicaid. Medicaid stands between life and death for their son or daughter. There is no other place for them to go. So that same empty, hollow look that we have seen so many times in the eyes of a mother or father who lost a son or daughter to gun violence, that is the look that we are choosing to visit upon millions of families in this country who, when faced with the loss of their only health insurance option for their disabled child, will watch their child potentially face the same fate as those young men in your neighborhood and my neighborhood. That is the reason why I pose this question to you that you are answering about the moral gravity of this moment because it is not fundamentally different than the one that brought us here in 2016.