Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. The consequences of the failure of oversight are enormous. This is not only checks and balances people often talk about. We talked about Congress having a responsibility to define which programs will be funded and how much and under what rules they will operate on, and the President has to execute those programs--therefore, separation of powers. By holding on to that responsibility, we serve as a check on the effort for an authoritarian to be the force that decides which programs are funded and how much they are funded at and how many rules or what the rules would be they operate under. We are seeing that transfer of power right now from the Congress to the President, because the President is deeply engaged in essentially the equivalent of a line-item veto by slow-walking funds, by freezing funds, by impounding funds, by slowly getting to the end of the year and then by filing a rescission request at the end of the year-- watching them magically evaporate when the last day of the fiscal year comes--this fancy term called a pocket rescission. Absolutely all of these are part of a line-item veto strategy and the President just implementing the programs willy-nilly, the way he wants, as opposed to following instructions from Congress. So in 9 months, we have seen not just an attack on the freedoms, we have seen not just an attack on the cost of living through utilities and through food and through healthcare going up and up and up, but we have also seen this fundamental collapse of oversight that you pointed to. If this much damage to the checks and balances can be done from January to October, if this much damage is being done to costs that Americans experience from January to October, and if this much damage can be done to American freedoms from January to October, then that next 10 months that is amplified because the administration is in full gear now. They are not diverting attention trying to get a Secretary of Defense confirmed. They are not diverting attention trying to get the head of the FBI confirmed--no. They are in full gear now with this set of instructions that flow from this plan, Project 2025, developed by our current Director of OMB, Russell Vought. And he is one capable individual who has a belief in the supremacy of the executive branch-- he calls it a unitary executive--and that the President should make the decisions about what is funded and how it is funded, that the President should make the decisions about the rules for those programs. That means the collective knowledge of these 100 Senators, bringing their diverse life experience, their diverse education, their diverse knowledge of different parts of the country--all of that diverse experience is tossed out. The diverse experience from our 400-plus Members of the House of Representatives is tossed out because, no, it is the President and his team saying that these programs with this amount of money under these rules. That is what the authoritarian rule is. One way we can exercise a check on it is through oversight, is by holding those hearings to investigate--and doing it in full partnership with our Republican colleagues. I mean, that should be a collective goal of us all together who believe in the vision of the Constitution, of this check and balance. Out of that information flows action items. When you oversee and see what is going on, then you get together and say: What is going wrong? Let's fix it. But you can't get to the point of saying ``Let's fix it'' if you have your eyes covered up, your hands over your ears, your head in the ground, and are saying: I don't want to look at the administration. I know a lot of bad shit is going on over there, but, man, that is the President of my party, and if I dig into that, he is going to be very upset. And we have seen how he is personally directing criminal investigations into people who have criticized him. There is concern by some of our colleagues--rightly so--that if they were the ones to speak up and say this is wrong, they will be next on the list, the enemies list. When you think about the fact that on that enemies list is even our own fellow Senator--like, these are people who he was unhappy with because they said that the 2020 election wasn't stolen, and so now he is going after them. In one case, he lifted the security clearances not just for the person who spoke up and said that President Trump is wrong about the election being stolen, but he took the security clearance from all of his coworkers--so a collective punishment strategy. This idea of weaponizing the Department of Justice, this intimidation of free speech, that really does affect people in this Chamber as well as outside this Chamber for fear of being targeted, and, indeed, one way they can be targeted is through their own folks back home. So when one of our Senators said ``This Big Beautiful Bill is a train wreck for healthcare, and I am not voting for it,'' within hours-- within hours--that colleague had been threatened with a primary and announced ``You can't threaten me with a primary because I won't run for election.'' Everyone else looks at that and goes: That is the power that is being brought to bear to create a failure for there to be oversight, for there to be people speaking up, because I know that across the aisle, many people care about the vision of our Constitution and our responsibility to stay in that framework for our freedom, for our financial success far into the future, for the generations to come. I know they care about it, but right now, they are looking at a powerful Executive who can bring the world down on them. I am hoping somehow we will have a few courageous folks to be at the front of the line and say: I will take the hit. I will stand up and say what everyone else is saying privately--that this is outrageous--an outrageous attack on freedom, an outrageous attack on the structure of our Constitution, an outrageous increase in the costs for ordinary families; that the vision of ``families lose and billionaires win'' is wrong for the people that I represent in my home State, regardless of it being blue or red; that the idea that healthcare is being slashed for tax breaks for billionaires is wrong, that nutrition programs are being cut for tax breaks for billionaires is wrong. We need our colleagues to join us in this effort so it is not partisan--it is bipartisan--and we are standing up for the core principles on which our country was founded. I thank so much my colleague from New Jersey. I see my colleague has arrived, from Illinois.

Mr. MERKLEY. My colleague from Illinois, I so appreciate the question, and certainly you feel it very personally when the target of the President's militarization or the sending of the military into our States is your own State. And you see it with very clear eyes because you go and visit and witness, and you understand what is going on. I know, in my State, I went down and I saw these three women protesting outside of the ICE building. They had a sign; I think it had a flower on it. And since that time, what has developed is a demonstration of joy and whimsy--joy and whimsy. What I mean by that is I mean the protesters understood that Trump was trying to start a fight and then a riot and then have that riot be a justification for federalizing the National Guard. So we have many steps in this process. The first is, he said: I want to federalize the Oregon National Guard. And the Oregon attorney general appealed it, and the district judge proceeded to say: Wow. The administration's description of what is going on is untethered to the facts. This is not a rebellion. There is not an invasion. So, no, you can't federalize. That is a test in the law. A very similar decision, I think, was reached by a district judge in Illinois. And then it went to the circuit court. In the circuit court in Illinois, my understanding is they backed up the district judge and said: Yep. No rebellion. No invasion. You can't federalize. Well, in Oregon, the administration took another tack. They said: Well, OK. We can't federalize the Oregon troops, but we will send in troops from Texas, National Guard troops from Texas and California that have already been federalized. The district judge in Oregon said: I am sorry. Once you federalize, it is not as if you can just travel through the countryside and do whatever the hell you want. You have to have a rebellion or you have to have an invasion, and you have neither. So, no, you can't come. But here is what really worries me about this. When you have an authoritarian President, they have a playbook, and that playbook was carefully crafted for this President under Project 2025. It involves so many pieces of stealing the power of the purse from Congress, overriding due process, attacking the power of universities and law firms, attacking the ability of the free press, including lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and pressure created against our networks on what information they can air. An additional part of this playbook is to be able to use the military to suppress domestic dissent. And to create the path for that, you want court decisions that say it is OK, and you want the military to get accustomed to being deployed so when you tell them to go suppress domestic dissent, they will do it. So here we have the fact that the President was stopped, but there are now two more steps coming that I am really worried about. One is that, in California, in the Ninth Circuit, a panel of three judges said: You know--well, one of them said the district judge was just right; there is no rebellion; there is no invasion. But the other two said: Well, you know what, even though the district judge used the definition of ``rebellion'' that was considered at the time--basically, that there has to be a sizable group that is well-organized, that is weaponized, seeking to overturn the government--we think maybe you should apply a looser definition of ``rebellion'' and then, instead of looking at the facts on the ground at the time that the President wanted to federalize the troops, look back a few months when there were a few more arrests, and maybe that is a justification to say there is something like a rebellion. But, most importantly, you should give high deference to the President. This is what terrifies me because I am afraid that the Supreme Court may issue a decision even soon on the shadow docket on the Seventh Circuit decision, and they will say: Yeah, it is a rebellion if the President says so. And that is insane. That opens the door to using the military anywhere the President wants, anytime, against our citizens, violating the fears of our Founders, who didn't want a standing army to begin with because they felt that it threatened freedom, because they knew Chief Executives are tempted to use standing armies against their people. That is what Kings do, and that is what authoritarians do. So they were terrified of having those standing armies. And then we had the whole concept developed after the military was used in reconstruction that that is enough. Military needs to defend the Nation, not be used. So we have the Posse Comitatus law, and the Posse Comitatus law says you can't use the military for domestic action. But there is an exception to it, the Insurgency Act--the Insurgency Act. And who knows what is going to happen with the interpretation of that act. So I really appreciate your bill--your bill--that says the military cannot be used for law enforcement because right now the courts could give the greenlight to the President to use troops and federalized National Guard in exactly that fashion, and we need to close that avenue down and do it fast because we have got an authoritarian President bent on being able to use the military against the people of the United States.

Mr. MERKLEY. Well, to my colleague from Illinois, the answer is absolutely yes. The President, as you mentioned, campaigned on the argument that there were violent criminals, and they were going be sent home who were here without documentation. What we have seen is a wholesale attack based on people's accent and the color of their skin. And in fact, if I understood a recent court decision, it has given some permission to continue targeting people because of their skin color or their accent. And the idea that as we go around America--and we are mostly a few generations removed from being immigrants--more recent immigrants are going to have accents, and we have worked toward a vision of being a race-neutral society; that people are now being allowed to be targeted by ICE because of their skin color, that just is, to me, a horrific embedment of discrimination. And I think that the President intends to pursue this aggressively for every moment that he possibly can as long as he is in office and beyond, to the degree that he can help drive future administrations. We saw it through his entire first administration. My first real involvement over immigration began when I read a speech by our then- Attorney General who said what we are going to do is separate the children from the parents and send the message that you don't want to come to America. I said to my team: I am sure I didn't read that correctly. I am sure I didn't understand that correctly because no American administration-- not a red administration, not a blue administration--would ever deliberately harm children in order to send some political message. I remember my team said: Well, there is one way to find out. You can go down to the border. And I thought, you know, I have got this weekend free so I went down to the border. It is how I became the first Member of Congress to go into a warehouse on the border and see the children being taken away from their parents. I will never forget this wire cage with about eight or nine kids in it, lined up by height because they were about to get a meal and had been told to line up by height. And the youngest was just knee-high to a grasshopper, basically a tiny little guy--maybe 4 or 5. And I could see these kids looking through the wire screen trying to see if they could see their aunt or uncle or father or mother or sister in some other cage in this big warehouse. And I walked outside and talked to the press about it and was just stunned. I think the Nation was stunned. And the President formally reversed that policy, a bit of time later, but he never reversed the drive to attack people based on their skin color. Whom do we see he wants to allow a free pass into the United States? Basically, a wealthy White population from South Africa, and they are some of the most privileged population in the world. But the President says: Those are the folks. And remember his comments from his first term. He said he really wanted people from those Scandinavian-style countries. So I do feel that he wants to pursue this aggressively throughout this administration, and we are going to see a lot more terrorized immigrants.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I see my colleague from Washington State is here. I would welcome a question.

Mr. MERKLEY. I so appreciate the question from my colleague from Washington State, and I am heartened to hear of your work across the aisle with Senator Grassley to try to address this question of tariffs. Now, the very first bill ever considered by the U.S. Senate was a tariff bill. So you can imagine our Thirteen Colonies, the 26 Senators, gathered in a fairly small space, and going: No, no. I want the tariff on a jug of molasses to be this and on sugar to be that and so on and so forth. Over the course of 3 weeks, they reached an agreement on a couple hundred products. And the one person who kept notes through this whole thing, a daily diary, got frustrated by it: Oh, well, now we are going back to the same product we considered 3 weeks earlier. In 3 weeks, they considered a lot. But the point is, it was Congress that was deciding these tariffs. This wasn't an inherent power to the President, and there is no law that it has delegated power to the President to do tariffs. Tariffs are done by law. That means they are a bill that occurs here, and it is a bill that becomes the actual tariff when it is signed by a President. But the President--we have never delegated that power, and I am not even sure, if we tried to, if the Court would say you could delegate it because the Court sometimes says: You have responsibilities as Congress that you can't delegate it. You cannot delegate the design of how much money goes to certain programs and whether or not they can be canceled. You cannot delegate that. And so here we are with this enormously destructive tariff policy. Now, count me in if there is a slight tariff on goods that are low- wage, low-environmental, low labor standards countries--count me in to encourage a little more of the factories to be in the United States. But for people to make investment decisions to put those factories in the United States, you have to have a stable tariff regime. You can't have the tariffs up one side and down the next. And so, no companies are making decisions about building factories right now. They may say: Well, for a few months because there is this big whopping tariff on Vietnam, maybe we should build a factory here, but wait, that tariff may change. And, oh, it did change on Vietnam. (Mr. MULLIN assumed the Chair.) And think about the chaos that comes in our foreign policy, because here we have wronged a country that we are trying to induce to be a significant manufacturing partner with us rather than products coming from China and to be a force in the region to counterbalance China somewhat, and we treat them in an arbitrary and capricious way. Well, there goes years and years and years--decades, really--of rebuilding a relationship with them. And with Brazil, the President just says: I don't like the fact that their strong-arm former President is being put in prison for trying to overthrow their democracy. Really? OK. But you are going to put a tariff on them, a 50-percent tariff. Or last week, it was going to be a 100-percent tariff on China after China said they were going to control their minerals. It is chaos. What I heard from small businesses yesterday--they said: We have two problems that are turning Main Street into ``Pain Street.'' The first is the tariffs. They are affecting either the inputs for our products or how we sell our products or just the uncertainty that is causing people to buy less, and all of that is a problem. They said the second problem is that most of them buy their insurance on the exchange, and because of the not so beautiful--what I like to call the big, ugly betrayal of a bill, the average cost of that is going to double costs in America. This one owner said--I think I understood him to say he had four employees, and he talked to three of them. They each said: I am not going to buy insurance. I looked it up on the exchange. The price has doubled or something like that. I am not doing it. I am going to take the risk. We know where that leads. That leads to people not going to the doctor when they need to go. It is small problems leading to big problems. It leads to big problems being treated in the emergency room--the most expensive place. So I do think the tariffs are absolutely--we need to reclaim that power here in Congress and the rationality and the theory behind it--a theory that will help make America more prosperous but not this crazy, fluctuating, up-and-down that leaves everybody struggling to know what plant should they grow in their field, what product should they produce in their factory, should they produce more, should they warehouse them, or should they shut down. I mean, no one knows.

Mr. MERKLEY. I appreciate my colleague's question regarding particularly the soybeans. My understanding is that China was a major consumer of soybeans, and they have bought exactly zero beans--massive, massive amounts in the past. But now when you go from huge tonnage, ships and ships full of soybeans, and then you drop down to zero, wow-- the overproduction of soybeans. The price drops on them. What do I do? How do I store them? They are going to go bad. Where else in the world can I find a market? Can I get China back when all this fuss ends? Meanwhile, Brazil is stepping up in the soybean world to provide that supply and will. As it is so often, once you lose that relationship and that trust and the personal connections, it is very hard to get those customers back. So I understand the distress for our farmers. They are just one example of the capricious tariffs--the massive fluctuations are so devastating. You mentioned in your question that there is also the issue of how tariffs can affect healthcare, and I have heard that tariffs are being placed on a lot of the ingredients that come in, including from China, to make our medicines, and therefore that drives up the cost of drugs as a factor. That is at least one connection. I suspect there are others--maybe the cost of wheelchairs or medical devices; I am not sure. Washington is an extraordinary exporting State on the coast of the Pacific Rim, as is Oregon. We are about the same size. We have kind of a friendly competitive relationship between our two States. But we have the same issues. It means that we often work together to try to solve those issues for our region of the country. And I thank you so much for your leadership. I see my colleague from Minnesota is on the floor, and I would welcome a question, if she has one.

Mr. MERKLEY. Well, I so appreciate the question from my colleague from Minnesota, and the commentary I was giving is more my distillment, my impression of the information in this book rather than a straight- out quote from it. But essentially, in the past, the death of democracy came at the hands of men with guns. Now it is coming through people who get elected, and after they get elected, they work to erase the separation of powers. They try to get a legislature that will be more of a rubberstamp and say: We will do what you say. Well, suddenly the whole vision of Congress laying out the programs, an amount to be spent, and the policies is supplanted by Congress just saying: Well, what do you want us to do? OK, we will do that. Then the Supreme Court hands over more power, and we have seen that happen here in the United States as well--certainly with the Trump v. United States, where the Supreme Court found invisible ink in our Constitution. I am pretty sure neither of us can go through here and find anywhere in article I and certainly not in article II, which addresses the Executive, that there is any sign that they want the President to be considered above the law, and yet that is what the Court said. So to the broader question of how--once you are in this authoritarian takeover, what are your odds of stopping? And, in general, the authoritarian works to entrench the authoritarian rule. So people get knocked down when they speak up, and other people are afraid to stand up and become more timid. The press gets a little more careful after getting sued. The Wall Street Journal got sued for $10 billion, maybe gets a little more careful about what it says in its newspaper. The network, which is threatened with the possibility of losing its broadcast license, or the network that is threatened with the possibility of a merger opposition may say: OK. You know, we are going to change our programs. We are going to get rid of that program that Trump doesn't like or we are going to get rid of that comedian that insulted Trump. And you start to see these effects pile up, and they grow over time. So in that first year, if there is not a reaction from the people, then people assume two things: Oh, that sounded outrageous to me, but maybe it is not so bad. Maybe telling universities what to teach, having the government tell them that, isn't so bad. Maybe telling the broadcast news what to put on air isn't so bad and so forth. It is like maybe kicking people out of the country for exercising their free speech on college campuses isn't so bad. If nobody is protesting, it is like, ``Oh, well, maybe that is not so bad,'' and it makes it easier for the authoritarian power to get a deeper and deeper grip on the system and become the status quo. And that is why you need a protest in the first year to say: No, this is breaking the norms. This is breaking the law. This is violating the Constitution, and we are not going to take this assault crushing our freedoms. We are going to stand up and say: Hell no. And then people go: Oh, I thought those things were pretty outrageous. And, look, there is somebody or some group or some force I can get behind to help know that I am not alone because, as a normal citizen, what power do I have? But if someone else is organizing and speaking out--and that is why this No Kings march was so important--7 million people, 2,700 locations. You had an incredible set of demonstrations in Minnesota. We had an incredible set of demonstrations in Oregon. And I went to one in a very small town. It is kind of just a few stores and gas stations. And it is in a pretty conservative county. And, boy, 200 people were out on the road with their creative signs. I was really struck, especially by talking to veterans who said: You know, I volunteered. I went to war overseas because my country asked me to do it. And it was framed as you have to defend this country and this set of freedoms that we cherish so much. And I will be damned if a President of the United States is going to take away what we fought and died for, a President who never bothered to put on a uniform. And those were powerful words that I appreciated from our veterans. But that is why that first year is so important, that people know that this is not OK and that others are willing to organize and resist and push back. And then the second piece of that is the next election because the goal of an authoritarian President is to make it more and more rigged, the elections. And if you want three examples: One right now is the President is trying to consolidate a voter registration list from States around the country, making it easier, potentially, to manipulate that list in the next election. A second factor is Trump is trying to get States to gerrymander in order to produce--basically divide up blue districts by attaching little pieces of it to red districts so that the blue district disappears, and you get more Republican House Members and less fair representation of the diversity of America. So the gerrymandering. And then he is complaining about vote by mail. You have vote by mail in Minnesota. We have vote by mail. You have one of the highest turnout States. We sometimes say we are the highest turnout State, and then sometimes I look at stats, and go: I think Minnesota might have, you know, beat us out a little bit on one election or another. But the point is that the integrity of vote by mail is so high because it cannot be manipulated on election day. And we see that manipulation in so many forms on election day, where precincts are moved so people don't know where to go. False information is put out where to go. They are put where there is no parking if you don't want people to vote. The machines don't work. The staff doesn't show up. The lines are long. People are intimidated. They are told they can't pass out water to people standing in line, which just seems like a horror of a possibility, people passing a law saying you can't give people water who are standing in line wanting to vote. And all of those factors really play a big role. That is why Trump wants us to vote on election day. More ability to manipulate the outcome of elections. So those are two incredibly important things. And then I wanted to just say: What is going on with Argentina that we are sending them money, $20 billion and maybe $40 billion in order to help them with their debt, which is owned by a bunch of Trump's friends. So they bought it for pennies on the dollar, and now they are going to become megarich. And where did we pass a bill saying you can send $20 billion or $40 billion to Argentina? What happened to America first? This is Argentina first. This is the corruption of the President's friends first. What policy is that? I want to see that on a hat. It is outrageous. You think about $40 billion. That is approximately $100 for every single person in our country contributing to bail out Trump's friends who bought up Argentinian debt. No. Hell no. I don't know what authority he is doing that under, but let's take it away. Let's get our Republican partners to join us and say that we should take it away.

Mr. MERKLEY. I would be delighted. Yes, I will yield for a question.

Mr. MERKLEY. My colleague from Minnesota, I appreciate the question, but I particularly appreciate the recitation of the preamble, and I grabbed my pocket Constitution here that I have been bringing up various points through the night. And the line that I have highlighted here from some previous time was: ``And secure the blessings of liberty.'' Secure the blessings of liberty. You know, psychologists may say there is a hierarchy of needs: You need food. You need water. You need shelter. But we are Americans, and I can tell you liberty is at the top of this list. The idea that I can't say what I want, the idea that a private university can't teach what it wants, the idea that a private law firm can't provide its contributions to the legal help to the nonprofits it wants to provide help to--it goes on and on about the compression of liberty. People around the world have come here, dreaming of liberty. They have seen Lady Liberty with her torch held high, welcoming people from around the world, where you may be oppressed back home, but you come to this shore. And you can say what you want. You can worship as you want. You can have your company operate within the law, making its own decisions, without government oppression. And suddenly all of that is being challenged. And so I do appreciate a lot your emphasis that this component, which may seem more abstract if you are a family struggling with healthcare and your children are hungry, but even for families that are dealing with the challenge of getting onto their feet with basic healthcare, they still have the DNA of American liberty throughout their body, knowing that they can--they may not have all the food they want, but they can say what they want. And they can criticize the President of the United States. And that President damn well better not put them on an enemies list and proceed to tell the Justice Department to go on some kind of a search to get them arrested or charged or tried or imprisoned. And yet that is happening right now, an enemies list. Let's be blunt about it. The President has been transparent about it. Other things he may not be transparent about. But when it comes to an enemies list, he is transparent as hell. He lays it out to the press: These are the folks I am going after. He does his tweet to Pam Bondi: Why haven't you acted yet? Why haven't you done it yet? I read one of those tweets sometime in the hours passed, and it is stunning that the President, clearly, feels he has full ability to weaponize the Justice Department as his personal revenge factory, and he is all in on it. And we have to stop him. Thank you. And I notice that my colleague from Massachusetts has arrived, and I would welcome a question, if he has one.

Mr. MERKLEY. I would be delighted to yield for a question.

Mr. MERKLEY. I so appreciate the question from my colleague, who certainly laid out a lot of ways that it is going to have a huge impact across the country and in your State of Massachusetts. I was thinking about several of the points that you were making, which really are parallel for Oregon, but they are parallel for every State. In some cases, the States that are most affected are not even States that are blue States. That is certainly true when we are talking about these tax credits, because 75 percent of the folks who access the tax credits on the exchange are in States that President Trump won. We are not advocating to restore affordability to healthcare because it is an issue in our States, although it certainly is an issue. We are advocating because it is the right thing for every American that healthcare is a right. It is a foundation for a family to thrive. When I think about the things that enable a family to do well, it is healthcare; it is a decent home, decent community; it is housing; it is education, the opportunity for good education; and it is a good-paying job that sets your family on its feet. In healthcare--a fundamental foundation in my State--the projected loss of people because of the slashes to Medicaid is 235,000 people losing their insurance in my State, a projected increase that isn't as high as the rest of the country. And now that we are starting to get numbers directly from the exchange from insurers, maybe we find out it is as high. But the projection across the country was more than double, 114-percent, increase. Why is that? Because premiums go up and the tax credit comes down. So a gap that is this big becomes a gap that was that big--114 percent. My State projected 68 percent. It might happen that it is less than 114, yes, if it is true. But here is what I know about inflation and the fundamental item. People get pretty nervous when they have 5 percent inflation. They get really upset when they have 10 percent inflation. When they have 68 percent or 70 percent or 100 percent or more inflation, they are not going to buy the healthcare policies. You mentioned that Main Street is ``Pain Street.'' Maybe I heard you say that in the past. If so, thank you, because I have been using that phrase, and I will try to give you credit for it because it may well have been something I overheard you say. I talked yesterday because we had folks representing small businesses visiting here on Capitol Hill. One of the individuals said there are two things that are causing us a lot of pain. I couldn't resist: Main Street turned to ``Pain Street.'' He said: One is tariffs, and the second is healthcare. He said: So many of us small business owners don't have enough to negotiate with a Kaiser or Blue Cross. We have our folks, our employees, go to the exchange. Well, he said he talked to three of his four employees, if I got the numbers right. And he said it doesn't sound like any of the three of them are going to buy health insurance. If it is as expensive as what it appears when I go online right now, with the premiums up and the tax credits down, then the gap in the middle that I have to fill is too big for what I earn, and I am just going to take the gamble in various forms. It sounded like that is what his staffer meant. But he knew that any one of them might win that gamble. They might get through a year without a healthcare problem. But if there is a group of them, a few of them are going to have significant problems. They are not going to go to the doctor because they don't have health insurance. Then the problem is going to get worse, and when they do go, a small problem becomes a big problem. When they do go, they are in the emergency room, which is the most expensive place to provide healthcare. And if preventive care disappears, which is such a big piece of what we tried to do in the exchange, either you could get insurance in which you are covered for preexisting conditions, insurance in which your children could stay on your policy to age 26; insurance where preventive actions are free because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; and tax credits make it affordable--if you eliminate that affordability factor, we are back where we were. I tell you, that impact on rural Oregon is devastating because rural Oregon is less affluent than suburban Oregon. So there is a higher percentage of folks who are on Medicaid, our Oregon Health Plan. And when it comes to children, we are talking that 70 percent of the children in rural Oregon have the Oregon Health Plan. What does knocking 235,000 people off do and what does it do to the revenue of the clinics and the hospitals that have to shut down projects? Or, according to the Sheps Center, 300 hospitals across the country will probably be forced out of existence, and they won't even have a hospital, won't have any programs. Where are you going to go, 70 miles down the road to find your next hospital in rural America? So it is a very big deal, indeed. I am so glad you raised it. There is a tie-in to the authoritarian structure that I just want to emphasize. And that is, when you have an authoritarian who starts their year with a speech surrounded by--backed up by--billionaires, then does a bill that is about sabotaging programs for families to fund tax breaks for billionaires, well those two things are connected because an authoritarian doesn't feel the need to pursue government by and for the people. If you are pursuing government by and for billionaires, then sabotage the programs for people and fund the billionaires. They are the friends all around you, including friends who bought up Argentina's debt, which we are going to ship $20 billion or $40 billion off to.

Mr. MERKLEY. I would be delighted to yield.

Mr. MERKLEY. As I start to respond to your question, I want to repeat my main mission statement for being here through the night, and that is to ring the alarm bells of alarm at this authoritarian takeover and at this strategy of doing authoritarian bills in which families lose and billionaires win. Families lose their healthcare or their nutrition benefits or their Medicaid in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires. But I am so glad you requested that study from the Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina. They are highly accredited, highly capable. It is a great place to go for this sort of information. I think back to a couple of years ago when we had a hospital in Baker City, OR, and they announced, very suddenly, that they were having to shut down their maternal care unit. Now, it is quite a ways down the highway to the next hospital. So, depending on the roads you take, can you even get down those roads in the winter when there is ice or there is snow if you are having to go 40 or 70 miles depending on your undertaking? Boy, it is the idea that, when you are trying to get prenatal care, you will have to go that far round trip; the idea that maybe it will be harder to get classes that you are supposed to take to help you prepare for being a good parent; the idea that, when you go into labor, you will only have limited time. So are you going to make it to the hospital? Anyway, it is a big deal to this medium-sized town to lose their maternal unit. But why did they lose it? Well, it is inherently an expensive program. So what happens when hospitals are looking at increasing costs and they have got significant personnel costs? They may now have increasing costs from the tariffs because the tariffs affect some of the drug prices and they are going: Well, we are not balancing. Where are we losing the most? So they cut a program like that or maybe they cut their drug addiction program, and folks who have a drug addiction just have nowhere to go or maybe they cut their mental health program. The point is sometimes they are so close to the line, they are like, ``We cannot make it anymore. We have to consolidate into a single hospital further down the road, and we have to partner with someone else. We have got to shut the whole thing down.'' So that is where, I think, the possibility of losing 300 or more hospitals comes in, particularly in rural Oregon. You have a whole bunch of rural America--you have a whole bunch of families who don't have insurance. They are going to the hospitals for care. They are going to get care, but then they can't pay the bills, and suddenly, the crunch is too big. There are 235,000 people in Oregon who will lose health insurance through the Oregon Health Plan who can't pay their bills. Maybe an additional group, a significant group, loses the ability to get healthcare through the exchange. That is a lot of uncompensated care. Maybe that hospital just can't make it. That is what is happening. We have been losing hospitals in rural America for that reason. They are already at the edge. This type of blow in the Republican bill was placed for January 2027. Now, that may seem like a long time from now, but that is basically 15 months from now that we are going to be seeing the implementation of this dramatic assault on healthcare. So that is why I say it seems legitimate to me that we can see that sort of damage to healthcare across the country, with hospitals in rural America shutting down. I appreciate so much my colleague having joined us. I see my colleague from Connecticut. Let me see what the right thing to say here is. I will yield for a question if he has one. (Mr. SHEEHY assumed the Chair.)

Mr. MERKLEY. Yes, I will yield for a question.

Mr. MERKLEY. My colleague has described very well the way this works. In the past, in general, you had military coups. People with guns stormed in, took over, shredded the constitution, tossed it out, had command of the armed forces. Indeed, it was an observation even at the start of our country. I have this quote from Madison during the Constitutional Convention in 1787: A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The temptation to use that military. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. So men with guns charged in and took over, but now we have a very different form in which democracies fail. It is the erosion of the checks and balances of the Constitution. So let's take a look at how those are being eroded. Well, we see that we have changed the rules of the Senate so that we are now doing mass confirmations of the President's list of desired individuals. I think, did we not have a list that was well over 100 the other day? There is no consideration, really, of whether they are suitable at all to serve in the desired positions. That is an erosion. Then we have the power of the purse. And the vision is that, in a democracy, the decisions on what programs should exist, how they will operate, and how they will be funded are made by the Congress. The President executes. So you deliberately fence off those decisions from the President. But what do we have right now? We have those decisions being made by the President of the United States of America. Of the programs he doesn't like, he is exercising a version of a line-item veto by slow- walking the funding disbursements by canceling grants, by impounding funds, by waiting until the end of the fiscal year and filing a request to have the funding authority reversed. Then, during that waiting period, the end of that fiscal year comes, and--poof--the funds' authority evaporates. All of these are strategies to put the power with the Presidency that belongs in a democracy here--right here--and down the Hall in the House of Representatives. Let's take a look at the Supreme Court and whether they are continuing to defend the separation of powers. No. Hell, no, they are not. They made a decision, and the decision is called Trump v. United States, wherein they said the President is above the law. There is no clause in our beautiful Constitution, in our ``we the people'' Constitution--there is no clause at all--that says the President is above the law. No one ever thought the President was above the law until the Trump v. United States case goes to the Supreme Court. Then the originalists, who know the Founders were terrified of a President trying to become a King, suddenly give him the power to violate the laws at will, with no accountability and with pardon power. I mean, the whole executive branch is above the law. That is another erosion: the liberal use of the pardon power to essentially give a free pass to hundreds of people who stormed this Capitol while the Senator and I were sitting here in this Chamber and they were calling for the execution of the Vice President. Then we can look at the freedoms. Are the freedoms deteriorating? One freedom is to criticize the President without the power of the state coming after you. Yet the power of the state is now coming after the people on Trump's enemies list, and he is telling, in public tweets, his Attorney General to go get them: Go get them fast now. I want action. They shouldn't have gotten off. Let's get them. Well, that is the tone of those tweets. One of the people who is high on that enemies list is a fellow Senator. If you have the whole of the executive branch coming after you, targeting you not because you have done something wrong but because they want to take you down, that is an authoritarian state, and it is happening right now here in the United States of America. When you have a President who is telling the universities: We will cancel your research contracts, millions or even billions of dollars, if you do not teach the way and operate the programs the way we want-- well, that is tyranny. If you proceed to have a President say to the networks: If you want that merger, or you want that broadcast license to be sustained, you better get that program off the air or that comedian off the air who insulted the President--that is tyranny. When you have folks being shipped out of this country because they expressed an opinion on policy in the Middle East, and it is being done with no due process, that is tyranny. So I would say, yes, authoritarianism is here now. Let's ring the alarm bells.

Mr. MERKLEY. Yes, I would.

Mr. MERKLEY. I thank you for that question. I start with a strong thought: Let's not let this happen. Let's not have a standing military. It is expensive, and it is too big a temptation for our Executive to use it against people the way we had seen in so many other places. That second stanza or that second phrase is what Madison said during debate at the Constitutional Convention: ``The means of defense against foreign danger''--that is the army--have always been ``the instruments of tyranny at home.'' That is using the army against your own population. So that is why they were so worried. Over time, because of the security demands of the country and a variety of various wars, we did pursue a standing Army and an Air Force, and we expanded and so forth. We got the Marines, got the Navy, and we have the militia, the National Guard. I think they would say: You have been pretty lucky so far that the understanding was so deeply rooted that these could not be used against your own population except in extraordinary situations. And one of those extraordinary situations would be if the civil rights of individuals were being disturbed and you needed the deployment to help restore them because the local forces wouldn't protect those civil rights. It is written into law in just that fashion. That is why there was a deployment to help students go to school--Black students being able to go to school--when folks were trying to block them from going to school in the South. That is what that deployment was about. But then you have this other standard that they can only be deployed if there is an invasion or a rebellion and just an understanding that that is a high test to meet. But the concern is, you can have an erosion of the common understanding that it is a high test. We saw that in two of the judges in the three-judge panel out in the Ninth Circuit. They said: Well, you used the definition, district court. It was appropriate for the time the laws were written, and that would normally be enough, but maybe you need to have a more flexible version of rebellion--of definition--and maybe you need to go back in time a few months, when there were a few more arrests, and maybe that gives us a stronger case to recognize that the President might be able to deploy; and you should give high deference to the President's interpretation, separate from the facts. I mean, just that last point--high deference to the President's view--and what it does is it destroys the barriers put in place, the standards put in place. No longer do you need a rebellion to be allowed to use the federalized National Guard in America. No longer do you need an invasion. You just need a President to say: It looks like a rebellion to me. That is what happens with an authoritarian President. They are not hesitant to say that. Former Presidents have been hesitant to say that because they have had a deep sense of their role in protecting the norms and the values that include defending our freedoms. But the authoritarian President we have right now does not have that compulsion to protect the norms--violating the norms, violating the law, violating the Constitution in action after action after action and maybe stopping when the courts tell him to stop. But even then, we had a 9-to-0 decision saying: Facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. And what did the President do? He ignored it. Those are all indications of the scary state in which we are at this moment. I thank my colleague from Connecticut very much. I see that my colleague is here from Maryland, and I would welcome a question, if you have one.

Mr. MERKLEY. I will yield for a question.

Mr. MERKLEY. I very much appreciate your zeroing in on this question of how the President is violating the law and the Constitution by taking the power of the purse, but before I address that, I want to thank you for going to El Salvador to visit Abrego Garcia in prison, because if you had not taken that initiative to highlight it, I don't know that he would ever have gotten out of there. The phrase used for that prison is there is a one-way door going in, and only coffins come out. That is the type of horrific situation it is. He may have easily been killed. He may have suffered the depravations of that prison, been affected by health issues, and he may never have gotten the attention necessary for the administration to finally help facilitate his removal. By elevating that issue, you did two things. One is you helped that man return to his family, which is a huge victory. I know he has more battles to come because of his being targeted. But second of all, you brought in an American recognition that due process matters, that court decisions matter, and that we are paying attention and we are going to keep making as much good trouble as we can when we see violations of fundamental rights for Americans, for the benefit of the individuals involved or for the benefit of everyone else. But we will hopefully dissuade the administration from violating the rights in the first place. So thank you so much for that trip and that undertaking. In regard to the difference between a democracy and an authoritarian state, it often comes down to who controls the money. If you control the money, you make the decision about what the programs are and how the programs are implemented and how much they are going to get. In a democracy, you have a whole collection of voices from different parts of the country coming together to share their collective knowledge, the difference of their economies, their personal life experiences that give them insights on needs that are relevant, the needs that have been expressed that they have heard in their conversations with citizens. That collective knowledge is placed into a plan for how we spend our resources in order to build a better America. The values of our country are deeply embedded in those spending and program decisions. But in an authoritarian state, you have one individual--a man, potentially a woman--and that individual says: This is the way it is going to be. I like these programs, and I am going to fund these. Those other ones, forget about them. Then we are a dictatorship. The President is exercising every effort to secure that power over the programs and is not doing it secretly. Mr. Russell Vought, who was the OMB Director at the end of the last Trump administration and who is the architect of Project 2025, was very open even before his hearing before the Budget Committee, saying: I believe in the unitary Executive and that the President can make the decisions and can impound funds. I don't agree with the Supreme Court decisions of the past, and I think if we get to the Supreme Court, we are going to get a different decision this time. We did get a little taste of that just recently in a shadow docket decision in which the question was, if the President submits a request to reverse a funding decision--that is called a rescission, to reverse a funding decision--and submits it within the last 45 days and there is a 45-day grace period in the law that the President doesn't have to disburse the funds, and therefore you have reached the end of the fiscal year, and, poof, now you are outside the window, and that money evaporates, the authority to spend that money evaporates. So that was the strategy that was tested with the Court. And I expected the Court to say the following: In the rescission law, it says that no rescission, no undoing of the existing spending, is, in fact, legitimate unless it has been submitted to the House and Senate and voted affirmatively by the House and Senate. Now, the House and Senate don't have to--well, they don't have to do the whole proposal, the President says; they can pick pieces. But the pieces that pass both Chambers, then the President can shut down that spending. But in this case, there was no vote of the House and Senate to undo existing law, and yet the Court said: Well, we are giving deference here to the President, and since the fiscal year expired, well, we will not cancel that strategy. So they empowered what is essentially: Yes, Mr. President, you can slow-walk the funding, file in the last 40 days a proposal to undo the funding, never get a vote on it, and you can wipe it out on programs you don't like. So the Court has given much more power on this, where previously the Court has said: It is very clear in the Constitution. The power of the purse is with Congress. It says it right there in article I, and, hell no, you can't delegate that to the President, and, hell no, you can't impound the money. But in this case, a Court that is much more deferential to giving power to the Executive did exactly that. So this is a huge concern, that the Court has green-lighted a fundamental violation of the vision of the Constitution and delivered a tool that we might see used repeatedly. My hope, like yours, is that all 100 Senators will join together--or at least a significant majority of both sides--and say: We are going to protect our constitutional prerogatives, and so we are going to put in a clause into any spending bill and say, yes, there is a 1974 bill that says the President can submit a proposal to undo spending that has been approved, but the provisions that we pass in this bill are exempted from that power. They cannot be undone through a simple majority what was passed through a supermajority. They cannot be undone on a partisan basis what was done on a bipartisan basis to address the wealth of understanding about what different parts of the country need. So that is the proposal that we need to put into each bill, every bill, saying, yes, these can be undone by future spending. But we do that all the time, by the way. We do a fiscal year 2026 bill, and we say there is 2-year and 3-year money in there, and now it is clear that that money is not needed for that program, and we undo it. But that is done on a bipartisan basis to undo a bipartisan decision, not a partisan.

Mr. MERKLEY. Yes, I would be delighted to yield for a question.

Mr. MERKLEY. I appreciate so much this passionate question from my colleague from New Hampshire. And there is no one here among 100 Senators who has spent more time working on issues of disability, bringing their own life understanding to bear to help millions of people across this country. When we expanded the folks eligible under standard Medicaid, it had a huge impact on the availability of healthcare for the disabled, and then there is the additional work we did to try to say: Healthcare is a right. It is a foundation. Let's build a system where everyone has access. But the way you have framed the difference between a democracy and an authoritarian power is powerful. Under a democracy, leaders are accountable to the people. And I am pretty sure that these 100 Senators all think about the fact that people elected them because they said they would lead on certain issues and carry the fight. They have a responsibility to follow through and make it happen, to honor that social contract they have with their voters. They are accountable to them. And if they are not accountable to them just in terms of the work they do here, they are going to be accountable in the next election. But the attitude of the President is very different. As you put it, in an authoritarian regime, it is more like the leader believes the people are accountable to the leader. And, wow, what a difference that makes because suddenly, there is no need to worry about the healthcare of the people, and you can lay out legislation that does damage to the people but takes good care of the rich and powerful because that is the world you live in, and you want to help those folks, and that is just OK because you are not accountable. That is the connection we see between the authoritarian presence of the President, who proceeds to attack and diminish due process, free speech, academic freedom, free press, proceeds to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his list of perceived enemies, and then strives to create conflict in order to send the military in to address a conflict and expand his authoritarian power. So that is one world. But on the other end, we have the legislation he championed. How could a leader accountable to the people support a bill that kicks 15 million off healthcare in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires or run up 30 years of debt--$30 trillion over 30 years--to give tax breaks for billionaires? That debt is going to haunt us in the future in terms of being able to do basic programs in healthcare, housing, education, infrastructure, and job creation. The answer is, because he is an authoritarian leader. That is how these two things are connected. These real impacts that you are talking about are so evident. Child nutrition programs are savaged to do tax breaks for billionaires. And here we are in this Republican shutdown designed to ensure that the cuts to healthcare continue, and there is more damage to come to ordinary people. States will run out of their women and children funding. States will run out of other basic programs. Food banks are going to run out of food, probably, because of the additional burden they are sharing. And not one element of the President goes: I am accountable to the people. I am supposed to be here driving welfare for the entire Nation. I can't let the healthcare double in price--as you pointed out--on average across the country. I can't allow a program to go into effect 15 months from now, in January 2027, that will result in millions of people losing their Medicaid. Then, in that bill, he has a third attack on healthcare, which is to change the way that States can receive or develop their match. If States can't raise enough money to do the match, they have to really shrink the programs. That is another--that is like a 2028 impact. So it is like impact, impact, impact, savage, savage, savage the healthcare in multiple layers. And this is the connection between the authoritarian mentality and the real effects that devastate families in our country.

Mr. MERKLEY. I would love to yield.

Mr. MERKLEY. Thank you for posing this question which has not come up in the many hours I have been standing here but is very relevant to the question of what happens under authoritarian control and, worse, recognizes that Russia retained some trappings of democracy, but it is clearly a dictatorship, and that is the danger. When you have that authoritarian presence--certainly, Putin is that personality, and he did get the Duma basically to become the rubberstamp, and he did get the courts under his control, and everything that flows, flows out from his authoritarian presence. When it comes to how he views the Russians that he is sending to war, he says that they are expendable pawns. I mean, they were sent on unbelievably unsupported missions to be shredded. Over time, certainly the Russian military has gotten much better, but in those phases where he just wanted to pour people into the front, and enormous numbers were dying--I still think the actual number is pretty high per day--it was, you know--again, he is not accountable to the people. One thing he did which was very effective is control over the press because I expected the mothers of all those folks being sent in to be shredded to become a massive force, a resistible force that would shake the foundations of Russia. But they didn't, in part because the information was so dramatically controlled. This is these early-stage efforts to control and discourage the dissent or, I guess you could say, uncomplimentary programming by our networks or by our newspapers; the suits that have been filed against CBS and ABC, and they are told basically ``You have to pay off these suits if you want the government to do its basic function to approve your mergers''; and the attack on public broadcasting, the attack on the Wall Street Journal, and more. I mean, the list is long. But when an authoritarian President wants to control the press and at least discourage--make people think twice about challenging him--I mean, a $10 million suit against the Wall Street Journal? I don't know where that will end up, but I imagine there are folks thinking, do I need to be more careful in what I say in this story? Oh, my news agency might get kicked out of the White House briefing. Oh, that is another strategy--to cut off. So the answer is, no, I do not think the PACT Act, which said: Hey, our soldiers were exposed to these chemicals, and there are a lot of diseases that flow from that, and we should absolutely make sure they get treatment, and we shouldn't put them through a long list of, oh, maybe somehow, somewhere; you have to prove it. How do you prove that disease, when it probably started--how do you prove it? The PACT Act is a great act. On Ukraine, I mean here is a country that threw out a President who was trying to put them under the thumb of Putin. Here is a country that said: We are not asking you to come to fight with us, but give us some arms. We are fighting for our own freedom. This is a country that said we reject the idea of having the dictatorship Putin-style. We want to preserve democracy with our freedoms, and we are willing to die and fight for it. That is the American vision. That is Lady Liberty, that is the best of what we have in America, and the Ukrainians stood up to Russia and have done a phenomenal job against an extraordinarily large country with massively more resources, and they are still in the fight for their future and their freedom. I see my colleague from New York is here.

Mr. MERKLEY. My colleague from New York, absolutely. Benjamin Franklin wrote that ``whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.'' And I will just roll into that speech and the press. And we have seen what Trump has done. He sued CBS News for $10 billion because he didn't like the way that a program was edited on the television. There is no way that that suit would ever have held up in court. But what happened, CBS said: Hmm, we are involved in a merger, and that merger involves Paramount, controlling shareholder, and they wanted approval for a sale of Paramount to Skydance, and Paramount was CBS's parent company. So here is President Trump holding the approval of that merger over the head of the network to get a payment for himself out of the company, and that was $16 million in the end, but then CBS announced it was canceling the ``Late Show with Stephen Colbert''--top-rated late-night show. Surprisingly, 3 weeks after CBS canceled it, the merger was completed between Skydance and Paramount. Trump didn't like all the things Colbert did to make fun of the President. You know, you can judge the freedom of a country by how much people feel they can say funny things about the President. And I have thought many times, I come to this floor, and I criticize the President of the United States. I have come to this floor and criticized the Democratic Presidents for things they are doing, and I do not leave here thinking someone is going to jump out of a car and grab me, throw me into a van, I am going to be disappeared or tortured. Yet that is so common in authoritarian settings. And it is so actually disturbing to me. One reason that I constantly raise the fact that I hate that we are seeing forces deployed across the United States that do not have an individual identifier because that makes me think about when people jump out and grab people, and they did this at the protest in 2020 in Portland--no label, threw them into vans, unmarked vans. You didn't know what the hell was going on. But ABC, well, ABC had their own challenge with Jimmy Kimmel, and there was a situation where Nexstar and Sinclair, they own dozens of ABC affiliates. So let me just say the list is long, including excluding companies or broadcast reporters from the White House briefings, and now, most recently, telling all the reporters at the Pentagon that they have to not ask any questions in the Pentagon or they are going to lose their access to be reporters of the Department of Defense.

Mr. MERKLEY. I am so glad that you emphasized the issue of the freedom of press and amazingly how it is under attack in all these different ways here in the United States of America. It is unbelievable. And it is why I am ringing the alarm bells. The authoritarianism is here now. Thank you, Mr. Leader. And I see that my colleague from Massachusetts is here, and I would welcome a question, if you have one.