Brian Schatz

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the numbers do not lie. The job market is practically frozen. Unemployment is at its highest level in 4 years. Inflation is rising. Homebuilding is stagnant. The manufacturing sector is shrinking. To top it all off, Trump is raising the price of everything. Vegetables are up 40 percent; coffee, 15 percent. Everything from toothpaste, to detergent, to shoes, to video game consoles costs more. More price hikes are on the way this fall and holiday season as businesses exhaust their inventories and give up on eating billions of dollars of added costs. This is America's golden age under Donald Trump. If it wasn't clear before, it is abundantly clear now that unless you are a billionaire getting enormous tax cuts and generous corporate giveaways, this economy sucks. Costs are piling up, saving money is nearly impossible, and just getting by, let alone buying a home or raising a family, is a lot harder. The worst part of it is that there was actually no reason for any of this. There is no pandemic. We are not in the middle of a war. There is no ongoing emergency. This is a crisis of the President's own making, and we are all paying the price. Donald Trump has made shortages the cornerstone of his economic agenda, and it is working. We now have shortages of nearly everything-- food, electricity, healthcare, workers. With less supply to go around, everything costs more. It does not take a genius to work that out. In fact, people have worked it out. Trump's approval rating on inflation and the cost of living is 24 points underwater. His approval rating on the economy overall is at negative 13. More than half of Americans think the economy is getting worse, and less than a quarter of Americans think it is improving. We are on a speedrun to become Venezuela, and people can see it. This is a deliberate economic program. There is this sense that he just wakes up in the morning and does whatever he feels like doing. And to some extent, he is improvisational, but make no mistake, he has a coherent economic theory, which is, we should shrink the supply of everything. He thinks it strengthens the dollar, he thinks it helps with manufacturing, and I think he thinks that the less there is of stuff, the more people have to go and petition the King for mercy. This is a deliberate economic program predicated on shortages across American society. In turn, the United States is set to shrink for the first time in our history. Think about that. The United States--the greatest Nation that the world has ever known, the indispensable Nation, the leader of the free world, the leader of the world--is shrinking. We are becoming smaller and weaker in more ways than one under Trump. But in this way, we are quite literally following Donald Trump's plan, and there is no escaping the consequences. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks, the senior Senator from Texas Senator Cornyn be recognized.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I was listening to the majority whip, and I have got to say, I have a little whiplash. I mean, I was here. I was negotiating. It was late July. We were passing paper back and forth between the Democratic and Republican caucus. The cloakrooms were working together, and we had a deal. That is the way you get nominations confirmed in batches. The majority party wants to get them all done, fair enough. It is their President. And the minority party has this really unique authority in this place, which is to slow things down. And the rhythm of this place is that the majority party goes to the minority party and says: What is it going to take for us to confirm a batch of these nominees? We have got a backlog. We have got to get some of these through. And so there are a couple of ways that that normally happens. First of all, you pair Democrats and Republicans together so that each party is getting a little bit of what they need. The problem with pairing in the Trump era, and it is different from Trump 1.0, is that President Trump hasn't even nominated Democrats to Commissions like the SEC, the FTC, the FEC, the CFPB. All of those Agencies usually have Democrats and Republicans nominated, and then they kind of languish on the floor until we cut a deal and we confirm them all. We had no deal space because there were no Democrats to deal out. And by the way, many Republicans with whom I talked said: Yeah, that is a fair point. Let me go and talk to the Chief of Staff of the President. Let me go talk to the White House team. We should get you some Democrats so that we can do some nominations in what they call the wrapup script, right? Second thing is on the ambassadorships, usually, we are able to confirm a bunch of the career State Department officials, people who work in the Foreign Service who are not political at all; and then it is the donors and the friends of the President. And I think the whole process of how we decide our ambassadorships is totally bananas, but both parties do this where donors and friends of the President are the political nominees for ambassadorships. OK. So those are the ones that we usually require a vote on. And the civil servants--the longtime, some charge d'affaires for Mozambique or whatever it is--like, we are not going to fight over that, and we just confirm that. The problem is there were, like, I think, fewer than five career State Department people nominated to these positions. And so, again, not a lot of deal space. But, still, we found 35 that we were willing to do in exchange for things-- and we did not ask for anything that was unreasonable in the sense of something that would be objected to by large numbers of Republicans. This was NIH funding and releasing funds for--even when we did that rescissions package, now about 6 weeks ago, on the foreign aid stuff. There were a couple categories on the foreign aid that everybody said they liked. And so we just said: Why don't you release the previously authorized and appropriated funding because people are literally dying around the world? And you guys say UNICEF, PEPFAR, the World Food Programme, you are still for that. You didn't like the stuff happening at USAID, but there are categories of foreign aid that you are still in favor of. So we found these relatively small discrete things that everybody in this place--maybe 95 of us--are in favor of in exchange for 35 nominees. Great, looks like we have got a deal. We are trending towards a deal. Donald Trump gets on the phone with the leadership of the U.S. Senate and says: Everybody go home. Everybody go home. And so the reason we don't have all of these nominees confirmed is the lack of the ability to conduct business in the U.S. Senate. And there are a lot of talented legislators, but what they have done is removed their frontal lobe and just substituted Donald Trump's judgment for their own. And so they don't want to cut deals with Democrats anymore. And that goes for the Big Beautiful Bill. That goes for their approach to appropriations. That goes for their approach for basically everything. And so it is true that we put some sand in the gears on purpose. That is what minority parties are supposed to do. That is how the U.S. Senate is supposed to work. And the way you untangle that is through the hard work of negotiating across the aisle, and they just didn't want to do it. Like, I have been in many bipartisan negotiations over the last 3 or 4 months, and they have mostly all failed because, in the end, we can only find a handful of people who are open to a deal. And this time we had everybody saying: OK, this looks like a reasonable solution. And then Donald Trump himself blew it up. Why? Because he doesn't want expediting the Senate's consideration; he wants to adjourn. He wants this place to adjourn. Now, why is that a big deal? Adjournment sounds like something you just kind of do to, like, OK, we will see you tomorrow. No. Adjournment for the month of August would have meant that Donald Trump himself would have been in a position to appoint whomever he wanted to any Senate-confirmed position; by the way, remove any member of the Cabinet or sub-Cabinet; and then appoint that person, and then that person could serve till the end of the Congress without the Senate ever weighing in. That is what he wants. And, you know, it is kind of part of a piece, isn't it? He finds the Senate to be a nuisance. And I remember this, I wasn't in the Federal Government executive branch, but I was in the State government executive branch. And once you are in the executive branch, you find legislators to be annoying, to be an impediment to the kind of stuff you want to do. But the architecture of the Constitution provides that we are supposed to be annoying, we are supposed to put sand in the gears, and then we are supposed to deal with each other. And so what is going to happen this week or next with this rules change is the result of two things: It is an abject failure of the willingness to negotiate at all, of the willingness to interact with Democrats for fear of being seen as too soft and insufficiently compliant with Donald Trump. The other thing I would just like to say is, it is a little rich, it is a little rich that we fly out at 1:45 on a Thursday, and our first vote is at 5:30 on a Monday. And I know Senators work hard. I am not trying to say it is terrible that people go home. They should go home. They should interact with their constituents. But these are 2-hour nominations. We should probably exhaust the possibility of working Fridays and Mondays before we go through with changing the rules on a partisan basis. We should probably consider, Do we need a 5-week home work period in the summer, or could we do a 4-week home work period and plow through nominations? And so it is true that there is a big backlog, and it is actually true that Democrats helped to create it. What is different about this year is that there is just no effort to untangle the backlog. When we were in the majority, I would walk over to Chuck's nominations staffer, figure out what was stuck and walk over to the other side and try to make a deal every week to try to get some of these confirmations. And as I had a blanket hold on State Department nominees, not a single person approached me once. Once, Jim Risch talked to me, that is fair. But I don't know if it is a muscle memory thing or if it is a Donald Trump thing but they have simply forgotten how to work with Democrats. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I join people on Maui and across Hawaii in honoring the life and service of Maui Police Department officer Suzanne O, who was tragically killed in the line of duty on August 15, 2025. Over the course of her service with the Maui Police Department, Officer O protected the Kihei and Wailuku communities with honor and an abiding commitment to helping others. She went above and beyond to support her colleagues and neighbors, volunteering for duty during busy periods and supporting the dispatch team even on her days off. Fittingly, she was remembered by those who knew and worked with her as a compassionate and dedicated servant to her community. In times of crisis, Officer O demonstrated remarkable courage and integrity. Her bravery was beyond measure, and she was duly awarded a Certificate of Merit for her heroic efforts during the fires in Upcountry Maui in August of 2023. Officer O's generosity and sacrifice were an example to everyone, and they will not be forgotten by her fellow officers whom she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with or the communities she so valiantly served. I extend my deepest condolences and heartfelt aloha to the family and loved ones of the late Officer O. May her memory be a blessing.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, people voted for Donald Trump for all kinds of reasons, but the main reason was that they thought he would bring down the price of goods, groceries, food, housing, gas. Whatever his other faults, he was good for your money, people thought. But it has been almost 8 months now, and the persistent economic uncertainty and pessimism are no longer a temporary blip. It is now abundantly clear: Trump is not making anything cheaper; in fact, he is purposefully making everything more expensive--healthcare, groceries, toys, cars, housing, electricity, computers, clothes, booze, video games. Whether you are shopping at your local grocery store or Walmart, prices are continuing to go up, and that reality is catching up with the President. He is underwater with the public on his handling of the economy with a 57-percent disapproval rating, according to the latest polling. Now, Democrats learned this lesson over the last few years. Saying the economy is great or not as bad as it could have been while people struggle to afford basic necessities is not a winning strategy. So Trump is ruining the economy on purpose, but are people better off in other ways? Is the country better off in other ways? The answer is no. A month ago, Trump federalized the local police department in Washington, DC, and deployed thousands of National Guardsmen and Federal agents because of a so-called ``crime emergency.'' What does that look like? It looks like masked men with no identification walking up to people on the street, arresting them, and disappearing them into unmarked vehicles. Up until a few months ago, that would have sounded like a chilling scene possible only in a Third World country, but now it is happening here in our cities, in our communities. Now, whether you supported or hated the previous administration's immigration policies is not the point anymore. What possible justification is there for masked men showing up and abducting people without a trace? Anyone who has encountered law enforcement in DC or Arkansas or Honolulu knows that officers are typically trained to identify themselves by face and badge as a standard practice. So why should Federal agents be any different? Worse, the fact that you now only need a black T-shirt and a face mask to look like an ICE agent means that there are a bunch of vigilantes running around impersonating law enforcement and terrorizing communities. This is exactly the kind of tyranny and government overreach that the people on the right worried about for many, many years, except they thought it would happen under a Democratic administration. They worried about socialism. They worried about the government impeding free markets. They worried about power concentrating in the executive branch. All of that is happening now under Donald Trump. We have the U.S. Government taking a 10-percent stake in a private company, picking winners and losers in one of the most important industries for America's future. We have the leader of the free world forming a secret police of sorts to kidnap people and send them to foreign gulags. We have the President of the United States making $5 billion in one day by launching a new crypto product on the side. We have an entire administration more focused on tormenting private institutions into submission--universities, law firms, media companies--than delivering public services and making people's lives better. Here is the thing. All of this is part of the same project. There is this tendency, particularly among liberal pundits, to wave off parts of Trump's agenda as distractions. He may be decimating American foreign assistance and starving kids around the world, but that is a distraction. He may be sending armed troops and masked men into American cities without justification, but we are supposed to treat that as another distraction, but we don't need to outsmart ourselves here. We can acknowledge that two things are true at once: Donald Trump is trashing the economy and creating shortages of everything--shortages of everything--electricity, food, workers, healthcare. He is singlehandedly ruining people's personal finances and the American economy on purpose because he believes in shortages. He wants there to be not enough workers, not enough healthcare, not enough electrons, not enough food. He believes in shortages. This is his economic philosophy. And his illegal actions and brazen takeovers of the media and the private sector institutions and American cities are the stuff of authoritarians throughout history and across the planet. These things are not intention. They work together. They are the same thing. They are the same project. So the question for us, and especially my Republican colleagues, is: When is it going to be too much? We have blown past redline after redline these past 8 months. And it begs the question: Is there any line that we won't cross? Because if not, we all know how this ends. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, on rollcall vote No. 493, I voted no. It was my intention to vote yea; therefore, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote since it will not change the outcome.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, on rollcall vote No. 494, I voted no. It was my intention to vote yea; therefore, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote since it will not change the outcome.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the mass starvation and death sweeping through Gaza is a moral tragedy and a strategic abomination. What started as a war with a just cause--to go after Hamas for the unspeakable atrocities it committed on October 7 and bring home the hostages--quickly turned unjust and immoral. Now, everybody knows how complicated and fraught the Middle East is. Everyone knows that navigating this generations-long conflict requires nuance and depth and a historical understanding in order to try to get it right. Everyone knows that smart and sincere and decent people can disagree on this issue. But what is happening today is entirely different. There is no excuse for this horrific suffering. It is not making Israel or Israelis or Jews any safer, nor is it helping to bring home the 50 remaining hostages who have been in brutal captivity for almost 2 years. The fact that this catastrophe was preventable is precisely what makes it so indefensible. People have been warning for months that the Israeli Government's actions would result in exactly this kind of tragedy, where children are dying by the dozens and hundreds of thousands of people have been starving for days. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israel scrambled to set up 2 months ago, has failed. According to the BBC, where there used to be 400 U.N. aid distribution sites all across Israel and Gaza, there are now just 4 run by the GHF. As a result, a third of Gazans--a third of Gazans--are going multiple days in a row without eating. The World Health Organization reports that at least 63 people--many of them children--have died from malnutrition this month alone, and more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid at GHF sites, according to the U.N. In May, the GHF's first executive director resigned, saying: It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence. Whether you believe this organization was set up to fail intentionally from the start or, more charitably, that the Israeli Government established it without understanding that it couldn't succeed, it doesn't matter. What is plainly obvious now is that it is not working. You don't have to be some leftwing organization or get your data from the Hamas government to acknowledge that the GHF is failing at its fundamental mission of feeding people, which raises the question, why? Here we have an Israeli security apparatus that can and did synchronize an attack of exploding pagers across an entire country. They can reach and gather intelligence from the high command of their greatest adversaries. The IDF is widely viewed as punching way above its weight in almost every way. Yet Israel is asserting that, given all of those capabilities, the one thing they can't do is facilitate aid distribution. That is too hard for them. Food and medical assistance routinely get into conflict zones around the world--Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Gaza should not be any different. What is different are the stated goals of the extremists in the Israeli Government: The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is to completely stop the ``humanitarian'' aid, conquer the entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration. That was the National Security Minister of the Government of Israel-- completely stopping humanitarian aid, conquering the entire Gaza strip, and encouraging migration. These are their words; these are not my words. As the starvation takes hold, their response is to deny that it is even happening. There is no starvation in Gaza. Who said that? The Prime Minister of Israel. Ben Gvir added--I have to collect myself before saying what Ben Gvir said: If they were hungry, they would have returned the hostages home. ``If they were hungry, they would have returned the hostages home.'' It is worth pausing on that for just a moment. Too many people in the Netanyahu government make no distinction between the actual enemy that is Hamas and innocent civilians. The idea that a desperate mother, malnourished herself and out of breast milk for her infant, or a 7-year-old running to the front of an aid line to get whatever scraps he can for himself and his siblings-- the idea that these people are in charge of which hostages are released and when, that they suddenly are being held to account for the actions of Hamas on October 7, is preposterous. It is another example of the casual dismissal of civilian death and suffering as if it is an inevitable consequence--war is hell and all of that. But what possible explanation is there for letting infants and 2- and 3-year-olds starve? What tactical advantage is being gained? Standing up for our shared humanity, whatever our other differences and preferences, should not be a matter of controversy, but too often, when someone is critical of Israel and they are a Jew, they are characterized as a self-hating Jew. And if someone is critical of Israel and they are not a Jew, they are characterized as anti-Semitic. I want to be crystal clear. Anti-Semitism is among the oldest and most vile prejudices that exist. It is real, it is scary, and it is on the rise in the United States. It should be fought at every turn--left, right, and center. Anyone who simply waves it away or denies the urgency of addressing it is either not paying attention or lying. But criticizing the conduct of this war; criticizing Minister Ben Gvir, who talks about ethnic cleansing; criticizing the withholding of aid; criticizing the excessive tolerance for civilian casualties; criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu's apparent willingness to cling to power at the expense of Israel, Israelis, and Jews everywhere--that is a separate matter. Everybody gets to do that, just like Americans get to criticize their President without hating America or the people within it. People are more than their governments. The Government of Israel is behaving terribly. The conduct of this war is indefensible. And it is not in spite of my Jewishness and my Judaism that I say that; it is because of it. There are a lot of people, including people I know personally--and I believe this--who believe in the sacred idea of Israel. They are good people, and this cannot be about vanquishing one side of the political spectrum, whether that is the left and center left or the right and the alt right. This is about grounding ourselves in a very basic principle, which is, whatever else we are fighting about, can we please hold the children harmless? I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, when it comes to one of the most basic necessities in life for people--housing--both political parties have failed. Both political parties have failed. Housing costs more than ever today, with the median home costing five times as much as the median income for your average American. First- time home buyers are fewer and older than ever. One in four renters is being forced to spend more than half of their income on rent, and homelessness is plaguing more people than ever before. This crisis was not inevitable; it is a problem that the government has created. There is not enough housing in this country because we have made it virtually impossible to build housing. Ask anyone who has tried to build anything--a shed, a patio, an accessory dwelling unit for their in-laws. They will tell you that the moment you try to do something, there are endless procedural hurdles and regulatory barriers that immediately get in the way--exclusionary zoning; minimum lot sizes; height restrictions; requirements for multiple staircases; environmental reviews; dozens of public meetings, where the grouchiest people in your neighborhood can stop the most virtuous project in your neighborhood; extensive permitting paperwork; years-long battles with community organizations and boards. And if you want to expedite your permit, you can pay a permit expediter. If you have 10 grand, they will put your thing on the top of the pile. Nobody should like this system. I cannot think of something so essential to American life--housing, whether you rent or you want to own--so essential to American life where the government has created the shortage on purpose, and then it strokes its chin, confused as to why there is a shortage. There is a shortage because of us. There is a shortage because of the government itself making it hard to construct the thing we all say we want. But the good news is this: If the government got us into this mess in the first place, it can help to get us out. Mainly, that means getting out of our own way and not preventing the very things we say we like. A lot of progressives in my own party like to say ``We are for housing. We are for clean energy. We are for transit and infrastructure,'' but you can't be for something if you don't want it near you. If you are for housing, you have to see the housing. If you are for clean energy, you are going to see a windmill or wind farm or a nuclear powerplant somewhere. As we envision a just and sustainable and wealthy country, we have to actually make the things that make us more sustainable and wealthy. There is nothing progressive about preventing a nurse or a firefighter or a teacher or a small business owner from actually living in the community in which they work. There is nothing progressive about making people drive an hour to work or, in Hawaii, forcing people to leave the State. Lawn sizes and building heights don't make neighborhoods; people do. Yet you will often hear people who oppose new housing say things like: We want to preserve the unique character of the neighborhood. And this is something that I am embarrassed to say I didn't know until I came to the U.S. Senate. I didn't understand what those words mean and where they came from. They are echoing a dark time in American history of the Jim Crow era. It was a time when communities specifically codified into law language that prohibited Black people and other racial minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods. The racial covenants would literally say: No lot covered by this indenture, or any part thereof, shall ever be sold, resold, conveyed, granted, devised, leased or rented to or occupied by, or in any other way used by, any person or persons not of the Caucasian Race. That is from a covenant in St. Louis from 1949. And there were contracts just like that one in neighborhoods all across the country. Then, racial covenants were outlawed, but their legacy continues today because what happened was the racists, after this was outlawed, figured out a proxy for race. They figured out a way to keep people separated, figured out a way to keep people out of their neighborhoods, figured out a way to make housing more constrained. And that is exclusionary zoning. That is minimum lot sizes. That means you need interior staircases. All of these things that sound virtuous--safety, sanitation, environmental review, historic preservation--all of those things actually matter, but understand that they are being weaponized against the working class. They are being weaponized against the working class. I am not sure if this is permissible under the rules, but I am looking at a bunch of Senate pages, all 16 years old, trying to figure out: Where am I going to live when I get a job? Do I have to live with my folks and for how long? Am I going to be able to move to a suburb or a city or stay in my hometown? Where am I going to live? So how do we fix it? First of all, government has a role that is not just getting out of the way. On the financing side, on the public housing stock side, on vouchers, on section 8, on HUD-VASH, there are lots of programs that work--on the low-income housing tax rate. There are a lot of government things that we do that have helped and can help more. But the truth is that the throughput capacity of the system is being constrained by the government itself. We could allocate $3 trillion to affordable housing, and if it is still hard to build a house in an individual neighborhood, all that money would get stuck. Actually, the State of California tried that. They allocated an enormous amount of money to housing, and they didn't get very much built. The county of Maui, many years ago, said: No new housing unless it is affordable--which kind of lands on the ears in a wonderful way, right? No new housing unless it is affordable. Do you know what happened? There was no new housing at all for a full decade. So we just have to embrace, on the left--the reason I care about this is because I think it is the single most impactful economic policy that we could implement, to make it easier to build housing for working people, for students, for the disabled, for the elderly, for the entrepreneurs, for cities, for towns, for rural neighborhoods. This is important because I care about that. Now, if you are a conservative, the basic principle is almost even more simple, which is: It is your damn property. You should be permitted to do what you want with your property within certain safety boundaries and all the rest of it. But if it is your property and you have a quarter of an acre and you want to build an accessory dwelling unit for your kids because they are adults and they just had a baby, you should be allowed to do pretty much whatever you want with your property. But we have inverted the presumption so that it is your neighbors that get to decide what you get to do with your property. So if you are a private property rights person, you should love the idea of deregulating the housing market. If you are a progressive and you see how much people are struggling right now, you should love the idea of deregulating the housing market. We need to reform land-use laws for upzoning to allow higher density, reducing minimum lot sizes, deploying manufactured homes, enabling single-room occupancy development wherever multifamily housing is allowed. We know all this works because it is working in certain places. It is hard to keep any issue out of the partisan crossfire. It really is. It is hard to keep anything out of the partisan crossfire. Everyone retreats to their own corner and starts talking past each other and trying to light the algorithm on fire. Our ability to come together, use common sense, and find a way forward will affect how people live and succeed for generations to come. Just this week, Senator Banks and I introduced legislation to incentivize local governments to build more housing near federally funded transit projects. Senator Young and I introduced the YIMBY Act, the Yes in My Backyard Act, which encourages localities to cut onerous regulations and adopt pro-housing policies. We can and we do disagree about almost everything, but on this, we should all be able to agree that in the richest country in the history of the world, people should not have to worry about having a roof over their heads. We can fix this, and we must. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, Dr. Fredrick ``Skip'' Burkle, Jr., is a distinguished veteran, physician, and humanitarian whose service to our Nation exemplifies the highest ideals of courage and compassion. Throughout his career, Dr. Burkle has selflessly dedicated his life to graciously serve not only the American people, but countless others who his influence and expertise extended to. Dr. Burkle was drafted into the U.S. Navy at the height of the Vietnam war as a military physician at Delta Med, a Forward Casualty Receiving Facility for the 3rd Marine Division near the Demilitarized Zone. Under relentless mortar fire and nightly combat, Dr. Burkle provided lifesaving care to wounded marines, civilians, and enemy combatants alike. While serving at Delta Med, Dr. Burkle came under an incoming enemy attack which caused him to collide into the wall of a bunker, resulting in a traumatic brain injury. However, Dr. Burkle did not let this injury stop him from continuing his career of service. His valor and dedication earned him the Bronze Star with Combat V, a testament to his extraordinary service in an extremely dangerous engagement of the war. In 1975, Dr. Burkle returned to Vietnam to serve as the medical director for Operation Babylift, a daring humanitarian mission that evacuated thousands of orphans from Saigon in the final days of the war. His leadership during this operation saved countless lives and demonstrated the enduring commitment of American compassion in times of crisis. During the Persian Gulf War, Dr. Burkle served as senior medical officer at Al Khanjar Navy-Marine Trauma Center, one of the largest field hospitals in the Marine Corps' history. Dr. Burkle retired as a captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve, but his commitment to public service did not end there. He went on to become one of the world's experts in disaster response, global health, and humanitarian assistance. Dr. Burkle further offered his expertise in disaster and emergency medicine by serving as the Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he was notably tasked to organize preparations for postconflict humanitarian assistance following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His work has spanned continents and crises, earning him well-deserved recognition. Dr. Burkle's life is a testament to the values we hold dear: service above self, healing in the face of destruction, and unwavering dedication to the betterment of humankind. I commend Dr. Burkle for his service to this country; we are a nation forever in gratitude for his accomplishments. I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Dr. Fredrick ``Skip'' Burkle for his military service, his humanitarian legacy, and his enduring impact on global health and diplomacy.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, it all started with the stroke of a pen. Within hours of taking office, in January, the President signed what can only be called a death sentence to millions of people all over the world. Executive Order No. 14169 simply read: It is the policy of United States that no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States. The order directed a 90-day pause in payments, while foreign assistance was reviewed. But it became clear that this was not a process for reviewing or reforming programs. It was the beginning of the end--a wholesale destruction of the enterprise, from top to bottom, in defiance of the law and of logic. Presidents can save lives. They can also cost lives. And while almost every President has chosen to do the former, Donald Trump, aided by a band of loyalists and ideologues, has chosen, instead, to inflict death and disease and starvation on the world's most vulnerable. We used to be the indispensable Nation that people around the world counted on for help. People would see the American flag, whether on the side of a truck, a sticker, or a food parcel, and think: The good guys are here. Help is coming. But not anymore. We are causing death now. We are spreading disease now. We are deepening starvation now. It is not because it is saving us huge sums of money or because saving lives somehow stopped being in our national interests. All of this suffering and misery is because a few people were hell-bent on ransacking the government and tearing down whatever it is that they didn't like or they didn't understand--to hell with the consequences. To them, the lives lost are just the cost of doing business. ``Move fast and break things'' is the ethos of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But when you move fast and you break things in the U.S. Agency for International Development, tens of thousands of people perish. Let's start with how we got here. Following Trump's Executive order, Secretary Rubio and Peter Marocco, the new Director of the State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance, issued a stop work order on all 6,200 grants and contracts worldwide. They also ordered an immediate pause on new foreign assistance spending. That meant that partners who had already completed work were not getting paid. Contracts that had already been signed couldn't be executed. Days later, Marocco, along with a bunch of DOGE staffers, including a 19-year-old and a 23-year-old, physically barged into USAID and forced dozens of senior career officials to be put on leave over so-called insubordination. These people were just doing their jobs. His issue seemingly was with payments that had been approved before the Executive order and were then making their way through the USAID payment system. Nevertheless, the career civil servants were escorted out of the building and locked out of their emails. Anyone who dared to push back or speak up was sidelined, including the Acting Administrator, who was pushed out to make way for Marocco to become Deputy Administrator. As he and his team looked for not just savings or efficiencies but what they called ``viral abuse'' that would be easy to mock out of context, FOX News stepped into the breach to help. For days on end, their chyrons blared: ``Viper's nest": USAID accused of corruption . . . long before Trump admin took aim. More ridiculous USAID spending repealed. Elon purged DC's slush fund. As the smear campaign kicked into overdrive, DOGE locked out all of the Agency's employees, including those working in conflict zones, from their phones and emails. In early February, Musk tweeted: USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die. Days later, after carrying out the destruction, he wrote: We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. And just like that, one of the United States' primary instruments of soft power over the last 60 years--which has done everything from curing diseases to thwarting terrorism--was decapitated overnight. USAID's success in moral, political, economic, and security terms was made possible by scores of public servants who felt a responsibility to alleviate suffering even if that meant putting themselves in harm's way, but in the end, it was torn down by a bunch of crazed ideologues who saw foreign assistance as an easy target to test-drive their project of crippling the government. Perhaps abolishing the Health Department or the VA in the first few weeks was a bridge too far. But here was money going to help people in, as Madeleine Albright used to say, faraway places with hard-to- pronounce names. And no matter how much good it was doing for the people whose lives were saved and communities that were built but also for our national security, none of that mattered when all you had to do was make up some lies to justify the vandalism. It has been only a few months, and already the loss of USAID and its critical work around the world has been catastrophic. More than 360,000 people have died as a result of the cuts--360,000 deaths. And so I will be damned if I let a pundit or a Democratic strategist or a Republican strategist tell me that the American people signed up for allowing 360,000 people to die--on purpose. For what? Deficit reduction? And to Patty Murray's point, 2 weeks ago, they just blew up the deficit by trillions--trillions of dollars. The amount of money that it takes to save a starving child or to prevent the transmission of HIV-AIDS from mother to child is minuscule. And we do this because we are the good guys. And we do this because it is cheap. And we do this because when we need something from a friend in a foreign land, they would think of us well because we are always on the scene to be helpful. These are not hypothetical or distant outcomes. We are no longer arguing about what might happen in the future; we are talking about what is happening across the planet right now. People are dying right now not in spite of us but because of us. We are causing death. We have gone from being the good guys--flaws, mistakes, and all--to being a conduit for death and sickness and hunger. A 10-year-old boy named Peter in South Sudan had contracted HIV from his mother at birth. His parents died while he was young, but medication through PEPFAR kept him alive. That was until February, when, without access to medication, Peter fell severely sick and later died. The health outreach worker who had cared for him said simply: If USAID would be here, Peter would not have died. A pregnant woman in a Liberian village hemorrhaged and began to bleed heavily while in labor, but without gas because of funding cuts, USAID ambulances stood idle, unable to help. And despite her neighbors' best efforts to carry her 10 miles on foot through the jungle to the nearest hospital, she died midjourney, along with her unborn son. Dorcas, a 10-year-old in Zambia, had gotten so used to her routine of taking HIV medication every night with her mom that she was confused when it ran out a few months ago. Her mom recounted: In the past week, she'll open the tin [where the medicine is kept] and find that it's empty. She'll run down to the clinic to go and check if she can collect her medication. And then she'll come back home and say, ``Oh, you are right. The clinic is closed. They're not there anymore.'' In Sudan, which has been ravaged by war and gripped by famine, a mother watched two of her children under the age of 3 wither from malnutrition and die after a soup kitchen that had been supported by USAID closed overnight. Days before he died, the older of the two children had asked for porridge. ``I told him we don't have any wheat to make that,'' his mother recalled, adding that the soup kitchen's daily meal, which the family had shared, was a godsend. A mother in Nigeria worried about how she would keep her infant alive, having just lost the other twin to malnutrition in the wake of funding cuts. A peanut paste supplemental that had been paid for by American foreign assistance had been used to treat her newborns for malnutrition. She wondered about how she would feed her child, and she said: I don't want to bury another child. There are thousands and thousands of gut-wrenching stories just like these from every corner of the planet, with newborns and children and families and communities. And this is only what has happened in the last few months. Just imagine what is going to happen if we codify these cuts. We are not going to prevent every death. We know that. We are not going to be able to feed every child. We understand that. We cannot feasibly help every community that needs help. We accept that. But this is something different altogether. This is knowingly and willingly and needlessly inflicting horrific suffering on millions and millions of the most vulnerable people alive anywhere on the planet. And for what? To save money? The idea that any of this is about finding savings while at the same time Republicans are exploding the national debt by $4 trillion to cut taxes for billionaires just doesn't pass the smell test. To top it all off, the administration is about to incinerate, is about to light on fire--is about to incinerate--500 metric tons of food aid because they let it expire while sitting in a warehouse for months. They are lighting food on fire. They lit food on fire--food grown in the United States, manufactured in the United States, to be sent out to the most vulnerable people on the planet, with a sticker with the U.S. emblem on it. And ``Make America Great Again'' apparently is doing all of that and then letting it rot in a warehouse and then incinerating it. What the hell are we doing here? You want to have a conversation about debt and deficits? You want to have a conversation about aligning our foreign policy better? You want to have a conversation about whether or not the State Department--not the USAID Agency--should have been funding operas and cultural enterprises in foreign countries? Fine, we can have that conversation. But I dare you to justify lighting food on fire. It wasn't so long ago that a Republican Senator stood on this very floor talking about those in his party who claimed that cutting foreign aid was an easy way to save money. A lot of times people say, ``Well, cut foreign aid.'' Foreign aid is less than 1% of our budget. But foreign aid can make a difference when properly used. And if you ever have a chance, travel to the African continent and you will meet people who are alive today because the American taxpayer funded antiviral HIV medications . . . kept them alive. It will not be easy to radicalize people who are alive because [of] the American taxpayer. That was Secretary Rubio, as Senator Rubio. Why is this happening at all? I worry that there is a very specific and rather dark view about what the United States is capable of. It is a view of our military, it is a view of our economic power, it is a view of our cultural power, and it is a view of our moral authority, which is, the best path forward, as we decline, is to lock it down; is to not engage with the world; is to not project power militarily, culturally, economically, morally. We are going from the indispensable Nation--and, by the way, this is a real thing. If you ever do foreign policy trips, people hang on the words of U.S. Senators who sit on the Foreign Relations Committee. First among equals. People want to know: What is the United States doing? What is the United States doing? It doesn't matter what the issue is. It could be fighting malnutrition. It could be economics and trade. It could be military strategy. Everyone wants to know: What is the United States doing? Do you know what has changed in the last 6 months? They are moving on from us. They are not waiting to hear what the United States is doing; they have seen what the United States is doing. In Trump 1.0, we could basically be reassuring and say: We will be back. Don't worry. We are going through a rocky time. Now China is in the breach. China has stepped up. It is not just that America's retreat is bad for us. It is really good for China. It is great for Russia. It is great if you are Hungary. The Kremlin was nearly instantaneous with its praise, calling the dismantling of the foreign aid enterprise a ``smart move.'' Autocrats in Hungary and El Salvador also celebrated USAID's demise. Now, there is a basic principle in political campaigns, which is that if you are doing something that your opponent loves, you may want to reconsider whether it is a good strategy. The moment we did this, all the bad guys were like: Very smart. Good job. We are very happy for you. Excellent. China has seized this opportunity with a little more specificity because they have the opportunity to step into this role. They are working on child nutrition and landmine clearing in Cambodia, health and education in Nepal, disaster response in Myanmar, and climate resilience in Mongolia. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to understand what this will look like in a few years' time. China will become the partner of choice for countries big and small all around the world. It will have increased its funding to global bodies like the World Health Organization, enabling it to win leadership posts and rewriting the rules in its favor. And we will have facilitated that process. (Mr. RICKETTS assumed the Chair.) So that is the background. Now let's talk about the specifics of what is in this package. And this point I want to make really clear, and I made this point in the Appropriations Committee. There were a bunch of controversial programs that precipitated this effort to cut USAID. Two points to be made: One, the total dollar amount of all of the controversial programs was like in the $100 million to $200 million range. That is No. 1. No. 2 is, all of those programs were discontinued. This is a budget that was enacted in March. This is Trump's budget. This is Trump's State Department. This is Trump's U.S. Agency for International Development. So there was not a single thing that was on that FOX chyron that Marco Rubio is continuing to do. So this rescissions package doesn't have any of that stuff. By the way, some of my Republican colleagues who understandably weren't super engrossed in the details--I had to send them a line-by- line of what these rescissions do, and they are sitting there going: Where is the opera in Ecuador? Where is the cultural exchange program or the parade in South Africa? Where is all the goofy-sounding stuff? And the answer is, a lot of that stuff was made up in the first place. But even if you stipulate to the idea that there was inappropriate spending, it is literally not in this package. (Mr. RICKETTS assumed the Chair.) What is in this package is stuff that every--I wouldn't say every--90 out of 100 of us have asked for--have asked for. What do I mean by that? I mean as the ranking member of the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee--basically, as the chair or ranking member of any of the subcommittees--you get a bunch of letters from your colleagues saying: This program is important to me. Could you please take care of it in the coming appropriations cycle? Now, these letters are private, and I will protect the confidentiality of these interactions. But suffice it to say, a lot of the people voting for the rescissions are also privately asking for me to fund the thing that they are defunding. So this is all about the momentum that came from DOGE and Trump and some tweets and some animus--real animus--to the foreign aid enterprise. Let's go through what is in it. $4.15 billion for economic support and development assistance. Our economic and development assistance is not charity. It is for countering the influence of the People's Republic of China or promoting regional stability. This work is in our economic and security interests. If this administration disagrees with some of the projects pursued by the previous administration, the good news is they have pretty broad authority to reprogram the money. Like, if we are doing program--I don't want to name what country because it will have foreign policy implications. If we are doing a program in a country, and this administration says: You know, that is not as important. They don't have to rescind the money. They can reprogram it to China or Russia or Ukraine, or whatever it is. They have that flexibility. What they are saying is they want less money to counter foreign influence. Mr. President, $563 million for treaty dues. Now, we are members of organizations with whom we disagree. That is kind of the deal, right? Because if we want to be in an international forum--even arguing for our interests, even arguing against other countries or being frustrated with the body with which we are interacting--we have two choices: We can either participate; or if we don't pay our dues, we relegate ourselves to something called observer status, which basically means we are on the outside looking in. In order to get in the room, you have got to pay your dues to the relevant organization. That is what we are doing here. We are rescinding all of the funds to all of the payments to all these international organizations. Why? Not because it is in our foreign policy interests--it is actually not--but because a bunch of ideologues don't actually understand how foreign policy works. That is the thing here. You can have a different view under whatever it is to have an ``America first'' foreign policy. But this isn't that. This is just vandalism, right? I am not having a disagreement with Jim Risch about how hawkish to be or how much to prioritize global health versus something else. We are just literally cutting off our nose to spite our face because what they want is vandalism to the enterprise. The tools of foreign policy are being shredded. So this isn't about policy unless you think the policy is: I wish my State Department were weaker; I wish the tools in our tool kit were more limited; I wish our ability to prevent war and keep nations stable was less well-funded; I wish that the only tool in our toolkit was military might. And it is not a small thing that many former Secretaries of Defense have said something along the lines of: If you defund foreign aid, I am going to need more ammunition, because this is the cheapest way to prevent war. Mr. President, $500 million for global health programs. Now, the new Republican proposal protects some of those programs funded by this account, but it leaves out pandemic prevention, family planning, and work on a wide range of issues; $1.3 billion for migration and refugee assistance and international disaster assistance. This funding supports our efforts to help refugees and other displaced people in conflict zones around the world. You know, most of us, at some point, out of the 100 of us do some sort of codel--some sort of foreign travel--and this is the kind of stuff we visit. And this is the stuff on a bipartisan basis that we all nod approvingly about ``it is great that we are doing this; it is great that we are providing this kind of assistance.'' And $1.3 billion for refugee assistance is being cut. I will tell you why. It is because it has the word ``refugee'' in it. I mean, that is how they figured out what they wanted to cut, right? They ran word searches. They are pretending it is sophisticated AI. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But all they were doing was looking for words like ``gender''; or looking for words like ``climate''; looking for words like ``equity''; looking for words like ``refugee.'' And if the program was named in such a way that it mentioned, it just used those words, it was out. Just totally preposterous. Our contributions to and participation in organizations like UNICEF is being cut. I mean, good luck explaining why you cut UNICEF because I can't--like, I am pretty good at imagining what my political competitors on the other side of the aisle would say. But why did you cut UNICEF? Are you trying to pretend that some number of hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent starvation among children is like going to do the trick in terms of getting debt and deficits under control? Nobody actually believes that. Why are you cutting UNICEF? If this is about tightening our belts, why cut UNICEF? Mr. President, $460 million for the assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia. This account funds a whole bunch of bipartisan foreign policy priorities, including energy security in Ukraine that will be cut completely if this rescission is enacted. If there were programs under the previous administration that the current administration agrees with, good news, they literally have the authority to reprogram those dollars. This is 2-year money. It doesn't actually have to be spent by the end of the Federal fiscal year. They have pretty good authority to reprogram it. But they don't want to reprogram to something that they consider important. They want to shred the enterprise. Mr. President, $125 million for the U.S. Agency for International Development operating expenses. Now, this administration is illegally dismantling USAID and functionally merging it under the State Department. Here is the problem with this $125 million. Yes, it is admin expenses. I have been in the nonprofit sector, and I have been in the grant-giving side. Nobody loves the idea of paying for administrative expenses, but I know for a fact the State Department didn't want this in the rescissions package because now that they have merged USAID under the State Department, they literally don't have the money and they have got to absorb a $125 million hit. Mr. President, $100 million for the transition initiatives and the Complex Crisis Fund. This is flexible funding in contingency accounts that didn't expire, and the administration can program it any way they want. Mr. President, $83 million for the Democracy Fund--$83 million. Promoting democratic values is directly in our interest and supporting resistance to dictators--resistance to dictators. We are cutting resistance to dictators. Good for us. ``Make America Great Again.'' Ronald Reagan would be proud. The party of Cold Warriors, the party that vanquished the Soviet Union, the party that claims a hawkish mantle is now saying: You know what, this thing, which is probably .00- whatever of the entire Federal spend and an even tinier amount of the debt and deficit of the United States, let's defund that because it is none of our business if dictators maintain power. It is a real change in policy here. Mr. President, $27 million for the Inter-American Foundation. This provides small, cost-effective grants, and technical support for locally led development projects. Strengthening stability and self- reliance in partner countries is in our interests. This is another one that I get a lot of letters from these guys saying: Please fund it. ``Dear Chairman Graham and Ranking Member Schatz, this program is super important, and would you please fund it in the next appropriations cycle?'' That is the private letter that we get. The public action is to rescind the money. Mr. President, $22 million for the African Development Foundation. The administration says the African Development Foundation's work is duplicative of the State Department's work, but the kind of grants and technical support that the African Development Foundation provides is not available through the State Department. Mr. President, $15 million for the U.S. Institute of Peace--a creature of stature, a creature of one of the first Senators from the great State of Hawaii, Mr. Sparky Matsunaga. The through line between all of this is that there is no correlation between the rationale provided by the administration for these cuts and what is actually in the package. I have talked to Eric Schmitt, with whom I have a reasonable, functional relationship. But we are talking past each other because every time I talk about what is actually in this package, he pivots back to what is actually not in this package and starts naming line items of things that are not in the 8-page rescissions bill. This is not the BBB, which took--I forget how--11\1/2\ hours to read. This thing is 8 pages. You can go and see there is no line item for $1.8 billion for operas and festivals and underwater basket weaving and whatever else nonsense people wanted to characterize as the U.S. foreign aid enterprise. This is economic support funds; this is global public health; this is humanitarian assistance; this is helping our friends in Jordan and elsewhere to maintain the basic stability so that there is not a conflagration in a region. That is what is in this package. That is what is being rescinded from this package. I understand that there is some obligation as a party member to oblige the requests of this party's President. I get it. But we are still a system with separate and coequal independent branches of government. The problem is: If you don't assert your authority, you don't functionally have it. So it is true that we hold the purse strings. It is true that we are the article I branch. It is true that we are in charge of whether a bill passes or not. But I will tell you the thing that is most alarming to me is not the bad policy outcomes--and there are terrible policy outcomes. The thing that is most alarming to me is that I have not yet seen in the last 6 months in this final term of Donald Trump what I saw in the first term of Donald Trump, which is quietly--not rudely, not provocatively--but occasionally, this branch of government on a bipartisan basis stood up for itself. Those guys would say: Look, we love you Mr. Trump, we love you Mr. President, but on this one, I can't be with you. On BBB, I understand. It is very hard to reject the President's signature policy accomplishment. But this seemed like one where we could have gotten four ``no'' votes. This really did seem to me like one where it would be a good opportunity to stand up to the President and just say: We are going to do the appropriating over here. Let me show you what article I says and what article II says, and we are going to defer to you on lots of matters but not 100 percent of matters. So my question is: If they are going to have the votes to enact this rescission package, when is it that Republicans are going to stand up for their own prerogatives? Why would you run for office; would you put your family through all of that; would you go through the difficulty of a campaign; would you go through the difficulty of being a public figure and subject to scrutiny and criticism and all the late nights and the kind of uncomfortable interactions and all of that? It really is a sacrifice. It is certainly an honor, but it is also a sacrifice. Why would you do that if you don't get to make up your own mind? I don't pretend to be able to get into the mind or the position of a Republican colleague of mine. I am from Hawaii. It is different. But I do think that there is a point at which it is just not worth it to give this guy every single thing that he wants. And it would be important and it will age well and your family will be happy and your staff will be secretly happy--at least some of them--if, at some point, you establish that there are some limits to the executive branch's power. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, Republicans don't actually have to do this. I understand, as well as anybody, wanting to go along with your party's President, especially in the early months. But being part of an independent and coequal branch has to mean something. Being part of the article I branch means something very specific, and it means that we are the legislature, and we control the purse strings. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that if the President wants something, you must do it. What worries me the most about this rescissions package, if it passes, is that it is one thing for the President's signature accomplishment--signature policy priority--to be supported by Republicans in the legislature. I understand that. I understand the inevitable political momentum behind that. But this isn't that. We have now gone 6 months without a single instance of Republicans and Democrats coming together and establishing that there are some limitations on this President's power. If you remember the first Trump term, there were a couple of moments when the legislature actually stood up to the President, overrode a veto of his, rejected a rescissions package. They stood up for their prerogatives. Do you know what happened next? Nothing. Why? Because that is actually how the system is supposed to work. We are not a parliamentary system. We are not a monarchy, where the President says, by tweet--by tweet: If you don't adopt this exactly how it is written, you will not receive my political support. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And that set us on a course toward passing this legislation, which I know a dozen--at least a dozen--Republicans hate, hate. It reduces funding for Jordan. It reduces funding for Ukraine. It reduces funding for global health. It did reduce funding for PEPFAR. It continues to reduce funding for public television and public radio. By the way, public radio is not just National Public Radio. If you are on a reservation, if you are in a very rural part of your State, it is often not just the only radio station but the only communications infrastructure that exists in a rural area. So it is the only platform for news; that is true. It is also the only emergency communications infrastructure because, still, many places across the United States lack internet. So Mike Rounds got his deal so that his Tribes will be taken care of. I am glad for him. But there are 49 other States where your emergency communications infrastructure is about to be defunded. Nobody likes that. Some people are pissed off about NPR's coverage or PBS's coverage. Come on. You defund an Agency because you disagree with their editorial choices? Which country is this? Which country is this? I want to tell you something a little technical, but I think it gives away the whole game. So I am the top Democrat on the Foreign Ops Subcommittee. What does that mean? We do funding for USAID, the State Department, and a few other things. When we do the appropriations process, we get letters from every other Member. They are private letters. A lot of people sign them, and they say: Could you please give more money to whatever it is--maternal and child health, or malaria prevention or the PEPFAR Program, the initiative to prevent HIV-AIDS transmission. We get a bunch of letters saying: Please, plus-up this; please plus-up that-- bipartisan letters. And we are trying to write a bill that accommodates all these needs. A lot of people who are about to vote to cut all this stuff are, on the side, writing me a letter saying: Please, increase these accounts. And why does this matter? This matters because nobody is voting--I shouldn't say ``nobody.'' Many, many people are not voting their conscience tonight, and that is just a fact. There is a characterization in poker: When you know you are beat and someone puts money in on the river, and you call anyway, it is called a crying call. You give away your money sort of crying. This is a crying call. This is a ``I know I am beat; I vote aye.'' And here is the thing: We don't actually have to do this. President Trump's attention is famously divided. If something pops up next week, he will be on that thing next week. He did not wake up every morning thinking: I want to defund UNICEF; I want to defund PEPFAR. His attention will be divided. And the moment the legislature stands up for itself, usually what he does is--he understands power--he says: OK, those guys were asserting themselves. They are a coequal branch of government, and I am going to have to move on from this. Why do I know this? We literally did the same thing. There was a rescissions package, which nobody remembers. Why? Because we quietly-- with Dick Shelby and others, appropriators all--said: No, we hold the purse strings here. We write the laws that determine appropriations. We are not going to do this thing on a bipartisan basis--enact a spending plan--and then come in on a partisan basis and say: You know, that wasn't actually the spending plan; that was just the spending cap. And the administration is going to come in and do whatever it wants on a partisan basis. So what happened? They rejected the rescissions package on the motion to discharge, which is happening in about an hour and 5 minutes. Then, do you know what happened? Nothing--nothing politically, nothing substantively, except that we kept the appropriations process alive. We kept the filibuster alive. We kept bipartisanship alive. And in this instance, it is not just about this institution. It is literally about people being kept alive. For the last 5 months, because of the United States' actions, tens of thousands at least--maybe hundreds of thousands--of babies have gotten HIV-AIDS from their moms because we pulled funding, because Elon Musk had some bug in his ear about USAID, and one weekend he said, ``We are going to feed this thing to the wood chipper,'' and because Democrats, too, and pundits decided: Do you know what? Foreign aid isn't so important to voters. I don't care if it is important to voters, if it ranks No. 1, No. 2, or No. 3. We are the United States of America, and one of the reasons that we have such a strong reputation is because we do things that are right because they are right, not because our voters are going to reward us immediately, not because we get some geopolitical advantage but because we are the damn good guys. And right now, we are ratifying a bunch of decisions against our will. We don't have to do this. Donald Trump will move on to the next thing tomorrow. And if it is not on this thing, which has low salience for the voters and is 18 months from the next election--if it is not on this--at what point are my Republican colleagues going to stand up for this branch of government? I remain ready to work with anybody on anything. I have talked to Chairman Graham about the possibility of literally enacting these rescissions, or at least a portion of them, in the State and Foreign Ops markup, and yet they choose this legislative violence. We don't have to do this. We don't have to operate under the assumption that this man is uniquely so powerful. He is the most powerful President. He owns the legislature in a way that no President has ever owned the legislature, and we all act like we are just sort of observers, like clicking on the TV and seeing how our fantasy football team is doing this Sunday. We have agency tonight to reestablish that we are the article I branch of government, and that means something. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, 2 weeks ago, Republicans passed one of the most unpopular bills in the history of the country--one of the most unpopular bills in the history of the country. Now that it is law, we don't have to imagine anymore what might happen; we know for sure what is going to happen to tens of millions of people all across the country. I want to focus on five things that are going to happen--five things that are going to happen because we no longer have to talk about a House version or a Senate version or what the President says he wants or if someone says ``If I don't get this, I am going to vote no''; now we have a law. We have public law, Federal law. The first thing that is going to happen is 17 million Americans, including 9 million people on Medicaid, will lose healthcare coverage in about 18 months' time. To keep their coverage, people will have to complete hours and hours of paperwork just to prove they are working. That is in spite of the fact that the number of nondisabled adults on Medicaid who don't work is very low--about 8 percent. How do these work requirements actually function? Well, in Arkansas, which is one of the two States that tried this and then pulled it back because it was a failure, the reporting portal was only open during the day and closed between the hours of 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. Let's say you work long hours as a truckdriver. If you are trying to log on at night to fill out your forms, you are out of luck. Let's say something unfortunate happens to you. Let's say you get in a car accident or have a bad case of the flu. Maybe you are not hospitalized, but you are incapacitated, at least temporarily. If you missed the reporting window, you might lose the coverage. What is preposterous about these Medicaid work requirements is that in order to establish that you are either working or seeking work, you have to fill out a form. If you get sick and are bedridden and can't fill out the form, they say: Don't worry, there is an exception for a situation like that. Guess how you apply for the exception. By filling out another form. There are only a couple million people on Medicaid who even fit the description of someone who is nondisabled and on Medicaid. Yet the actual official projections, which is to say the way they save the money, is they are projecting that many, many millions of people are going to get kicked off of Medicaid even though they are eligible. I know I am a Democrat, and I wanted this bill to fail, and I want to tell you why this is a failure of a bill, but that is literally in their projections. Without those projections, they don't have enough revenue for the biggest tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the history of the planet. No. 2, hundreds of rural hospitals and nursing homes will close without enough funding to continue operating. More people are going to get sick because of this law, but we are going to have fewer hospitals and doctors to take care of them. Why? Because Medicaid is a big revenue stream for really all hospitals but especially rural hospitals. It can be up to about half of the payer mix. What is a payer mix? It just means you might get paid by private insurance 30 percent, you might get paid by Medicaid 45 percent, you might have a little VA, and you might have a little private pay; it adds up to 100 percent. As you look at your revenue picture, 40, 50-- sometimes even more--percent of that money comes from Medicaid. If there is a huge $1 trillion nationwide reduction in Medicaid money, that money is reduced money for rural hospitals, and rural hospitals will definitely close--not all of them but many of them. So even if you are not on Medicaid, if you live in a place where there is a rural hospital and that is the flagship hospital for a small town, that might not be available to you. You might have to drive 2 or 3 hours for care, even emergency care. No. 3, starting next year, tens of millions of people are going to pay hundreds of dollars a month more for health insurance. This is what, I think, we should linger on because now that the fight over ObamaCare is sort of in the rearview mirror, people just think they get onto the ACA portal; they sign up for their healthcare; and they pay what they pay, right? Like, Oh, I am on a family plan. I want ``this'' level of deductible. Then it spits out how much you are going to pay every month. What tens of millions of people don't actually know is that those rates on the exchange are subsidized, and without those subsidies, we are going to go back to the bad old days of pre- ObamaCare, when people would pay absurd amounts of money for their healthcare insurance even if they are employed, even if they do have insurance. What is, I think, underrated, both politically and on policy, is all of those rates get set in the next couple of months because, in order to start paying and in order to start enrolling, you have got to notify people: Hey, your thing that was $289 a month now is $789 a month. So sometime in the fall--it depends on the State, in October, November, and some people in December--people are going to get a letter, saying: If you want to stay on the same healthcare plan, here is your new price. And those new prices are going to be astronomical. Now, we do have a disagreement between the parties. I think there are a lot of people who just don't like the public subsidy of healthcare insurance premiums. I am sure the Presiding Officer has her reservations about that kind of thing. It is about the size and the scope of government, but there is a factual aspect to this which is, whatever one's governing philosophy is and whatever one thought about the Affordable Care Act, the plain fact of the matter is, people are going to get letters from their insurance carriers with astronomical increases that they will not be able to pay. No. 4, 5 million people are either going to lose some or all of their nutritional assistance starting next year. You know, this trope is almost as old as I am--like some lazy person on food stamps just collecting food stamps, loving that life, going to the store, buying fancy stuff. It is $6 a day. The average nutritional assistance amount per person per day is 6 bucks. I don't know if you know this, but we have subsidized food in the U.S. Senate, not because the government is paying for it but because all of the restaurants that operate here don't have to pay lease rent so it is a little bit cheaper than you would normally get. I can't get anything for 6 bucks downstairs in the Dirksen cafeteria, not that would feed me. Six dollars a day is the average amount, and what the Republicans decided to do to generate savings, to find savings, is to cut nutritional assistance. Why? Because they needed to pay for the biggest tax cut in American history for the wealthiest people and corporations that has ever existed. It would be one thing if people were getting 75 bucks a day for food. It would be one thing if they were getting 25 bucks a day for food, but they are getting 6 bucks, and 5 million people will now have an enormously difficult time trying to figure out just how to survive the day--and I mean that quite literally, survive the day--to find the calories within their $6 or $8 or $12 budget. Finally, people are going to pay hundreds of dollars more per year in electricity because this bill throttles the cheapest and most abundant form of energy in wind and solar. And this is where you have got to stay with me for a moment. I am very passionate about climate action. I think it is a planetary emergency. I think it is a moral obligation that we take care of our planet so it can sustain us for generations to come. But even if you don't care about that, the only energy that is ready to come online right now is solar energy--some wind energy but mostly solar energy. Why? Because nuclear, frankly, takes at least 10 years to permit and site, and, of course, anytime anyone wants to do any nuclear power generation, everybody in whatever neighborhood or State or county that is in tries to stop it. You don't just have regulatory risk; you have project risk, so 10 years is an optimistic scenario. I am a big believer in nuclear energy, but 10 years is the most realistic scenario to get a bunch of nuclear energy online. Likewise, geothermal is, maybe, 5 to 8 years in the most optimistic scenario. Again, I love geothermal energy. I think it is an untapped resource across the United States of America. We have about a 6-year gap before any of those other technologies are ready. So a lot of fossil advocates go: Well, why don't we do more gas? There is a backlog of combined-cycle gas turbines, and that can't just be fixed by saying: ``I will take more.'' Everybody wants more. There is a backlog. You cannot get gas generation online in the next 5 years. So what does that mean? It means, over the next 5 years, solar is the stuff that is instantly pluggable into the grid, supercheap, not terribly controversial except for in this Chamber, and ready to power the AI revolution and whatever other load needs we have. But this bill kind of punitively, kind of ideologically decides: No, we are not for ``all of the above''; you know that thing we said about whatever is cheap and plentiful and available every time we were trying to prevent clean energy from coming on the grid? Do you remember that thing we used to say? Now, really, what we meant is, we quite hate solar energy, particularly. We hate solar energy. Again, I think that is preposterous from a planetary standpoint, but even if there were no planetary crisis, this is the energy that is available to us, and we are about to face energy shortages. The reason, for instance, Texas, of all places, has not had blackouts and brownouts is because solar can absorb wind; the Sun is high. It is 108 degrees, and everybody is pumping their air-conditioners. That also happens to be the point in time and the point of the day when all of the solar farms are running at full capacity, and they can power the grid. So solar energy isn't something from 17 years ago when you said, you know, sometimes the Sun is shining and sometimes it is not and it is intermittent and the batteries aren't there. All of that is in the rearview mirror. All of the technical issues--not all of them. Ninety percent of the technical issues related to solar energy have been resolved. That is the scariest thing for the fossil energy people. Do you know why? Because they can't argue that this isn't economically smarter; they just have to argue that it is woke or something, like woke electrons. Who cares where the electrons come from? If they are cheap and plentiful, we should all be for them. So this bill is going to create shortages which will drive up the prices and, in some places, reduce power quality. What does ``power quality'' mean? It means we are going to have blackouts and brownouts across the country. To do any of these things in the bill would be bad, but to do all of it--all of it--in order to pay for the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in history is morally and economically bankrupt. Nobody asked for any of this. Trump voters were not demanding any of this. Nobody was asking to lose their healthcare or not be able to feed their kids or to pay more to keep the lights on at home, but they raced to do it anyway, knowing full well how devastating it would be for the country and for their own home States. One final point: We are not going to stop talking about this. We are going to talk about this until it is repealed. We are going to talk about this when the rates go up for your electricity. We are going to talk about this when kids are thrown off their nutritional assistance. We are going to talk about this when rural hospitals close. We are going to talk about this when your insurance coverage rates go up. We are not going to stop talking about this because this document which was enacted into law is a perfect encapsulation of the difference between the political parties. My party is flawed--obviously, my party is flawed--but I have never seen my party propose a bill that transferred so much money from the poor to the rich, and I have never seen my party propose a bill that raises the price of electricity, that raises the price of food, and that raises the price of healthcare. So we are going to talk about this today, tomorrow, and for the next 18 months until this thing is repealed from the Federal lawbooks. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the Queen Liliuokalani Keiki Hula Competition. Since its founding in 1976 by the Kalihi-Palama Culture and Arts Society, this annual event has brought together thousands of young dancers from across Hawaii and the world to celebrate the legacy of Queen Liliuokalani through hula (dance) and oli (chant). This year, more than 600 children ages 6 to 12 will showcase their talent, discipline, and connection to Hawaiian culture as participants in this competition. Through traditional hula kahiko and contemporary hula auana, these young dancers embody the stories, values, and spirit of Hawaii. They grow up immersed in the Native Hawaiian traditions and cultural practices that help create a sense of community and identity. The related cultural demonstrations and exhibitions from local artisans and the Hawaii State Archives help share some of that knowledge and history with both the participants and attendees. This milestone marks not only five decades of excellence in Hawaiian dance and chant but also an enduring commitment to revitalization of the Hawaiian culture. I ask my colleagues to join me in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Queen Liliuokalani Keiki Hula Competition and in recognizing its contribution to the preservation and celebration of Hawaiian culture.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. The Presiding Officer is a distinguished businessman. He understands capital flows. He understands investment. There are a lot of people in this Chamber and across the country who, on a nonidealogical basis, want a consistent tax code so that businesses can invest with certainty and predictability. So let's look at some of the numbers here in terms of the impact of this bill. This bill will kill 300,000 jobs in wind and solar per year. We are going to lose out on $450 billion in capital as thousands of projects go under. And because of that, we are going to generate about 500 gigawatts less energy in the next decade. Now, there was a time--and I lived through it as a politician--there was a time when people who wanted to take climate action had to argue for that climate action because it is a planetary emergency, and there were tradeoffs. And people on the other side said: Look, as we try to take action to deal with this planetary crisis, we can't create shortages. We can't increase prices. We can't impede economic progress. All of that has flipped. This bill will create shortages. This bill will impede economic progress. This bill will increase prices. The 500 gigawatts less energy in the next decade is pretty much exactly the amount of energy that we are going to need to meet rising demand. We are going to have energy shortages as a result of this legislation. And you don't have to love clean energy or be an environmentalist-- and I love clean energy, and I am an environmentalist. But you don't have to care about the climate. I think you should. You don't have to care about the climate to understand that this is a basic question of supply and demand. Energy demand is soaring for the first time in decades largely--not exclusively but largely--because of AI data centers. And our best chance of meeting it in the next few years is through wind and solar, not oil and gas. Even nuclear and geothermal are going to take a while. That is not just a political talking point or preference of mine. It is just a fact that gas turbines are stuck in a yearslong backlog. It is also a fact that 80 percent of the new capacity on the grid last year came from solar and storage. It is growing; it is cheap; and it works. And there are hundreds more projects that are in the pipeline waiting to be hooked up. So the idea that we are going to kill the only energy--the only energy--that can be brought online in the short run the very same week that half the country was melting in a record heat wave which left tens of thousands of people without power is beyond absurd. Let's talk about how this bill does all of this damage. Specifically, it creates an impossible deadline for projects to be operational in order to claim the clean energy tax credits. Remember, these clean energy tax credits are Federal law. They are on the books. So when you have a Federal statute, it is not unreasonable as an investor to say: Look, I have got this tax credit. I am going to get x percent back from my initial investment. And you do the pro forma; you do the underwriting; and you figure out that the thing pencils out. And now what they are saying is that you have got to be operational in 60 days. If anyone has even built a deck in their front yard or tried to do an extension, nothing gets built in 60 days, certainly not a clean energy project. And it has to be placed in service. What does ``placed in service'' mean? It means not only do you have to have the thing built, you have to have a power purchase agreement through your public service commission or public utilities commission. You have to have a deal in place in the next 60 days after enactment or you get nothing. So imagine you are a company investing in a solar or battery storage project. You have already put money down. You have secured land and a power purchase agreement, and you are working on permits. And when you started the project, the Tax Code said you could claim a credit to claim the upfront costs. Now, unless you are fully operational, you are out to luck. On average, a project takes 4 years to go through the full process. So even if you have already started that progress, you now have very, very little time to get it done. We are going to strand hundreds of billions of dollars in capital. And so the impact on price is going to be crazy. The impact on jobs is going to be crazy. But the impact on America as an investable proposition is the most dangerous part of this. I don't know that we have ever, through Federal law, made a big subsidy, made a big bet on a certain industry, and then halfway through that process said: Never mind. We didn't mean that. You are stuck. According to the Edison Electric Institute--and, by the way, I can guarantee you, this is the first and maybe last time I will ever, ever quote the Edison Electric Institute--that will cost people, not companies but people, ratepayers, $60 billion in this decade alone. Your electric bills are about to go up. A representative of a solar company in Hawaii put it this way: It is really unclear in the current version of the bill what the renewable energy industry even looks like if it were passed today. An owner of a solar company in Montana worried that the credits disappearing would force him to lay off half of his workers. He says: Montana is deeply red, but it's also a very practical place. And so green energy renewables became a taboo phrase somehow. The practical energy needs are undeniable, and so if we can get past our disagreements about the phraseology and realize that it's electrons, watts . . . amps. And it's all cheaper. A representative of a wind turbine company in Colorado said: I don't look at what we do as green or blue or red. An electron doesn't have a color. That is the point. Electrons don't have a color. Wanting cheap, abundant energy is not woke. Wanting a liveable planet today and for future generations is not radical. And wanting reliable power and to avoid blackouts and brownouts is not a leftist project. But even if you set all of that aside for a minute, the States that have benefited the most from these investments are Republican States. According to estimates, nearly three-quarters of clean energy manufacturing facilities are located in Republican States. It means that Republicans are going to pay more for energy. It means Republicans will lose jobs in clean energy because of a Republican bill. It means Republicans are going to have more blackouts in their homes and businesses. Gutting clean energy is not somehow owning the libs. And at least some Republicans in the Senate and House understand that, even if their votes have not manifested to say otherwise. Here is a letter from 21 House Republicans earlier this year. As our conference has long believed, an all-of-the-above energy approach, combined with a robust advanced manufacturing sector, will help support the United States' position as a global energy leader. Countless American companies are utilizing sector-wide energy tax credits--many of which have enjoyed broad support in Congress--to make major investments in domestic energy production and infrastructure for traditional and renewable sources alike. And it goes on: As energy demand continues to skyrocket, any modifications that inhibit our ability to deploy new energy production risk sparking an energy crisis-- ``[R]isks sparking an energy crisis.'' Twenty-one House Republicans are worried about an energy crisis imposed by the Republican Congress. It goes on: This is especially true for energy credits with direct passthrough benefit to ratepayers, where such repeals would increase utility bills the very next day. ``[W]ould increase utility bills the very next day.'' This is not me, progressive Senator from the State of Hawaii who has made a career out of fighting climate change. This is 21 House Republicans saying: We are going to create a crisis here. Maybe we shouldn't pass this thing. A lot of this stuff benefits us. If we are all out here talking about ``all of the above,'' why are we cutting off our nose to spite our face? Just because someone wants a talking point? Like, people are literally going to lose their jobs immediately upon enactment. America is going to become a very challenging place to make major investments in immediately upon enactment. The AI industry may move abroad immediately upon enactment. And prices will go up pretty much right away, as well. A group of 175 mayors and local leaders wrote: For the first time, State and local governments, as well as essential nonprofit community organizations--such as houses of worship, hospitals, and schools--can access the same clean energy tax credits as the private sector through elective pay. This has led to major projects in our communities, like solar installations for town halls, alternative fueling infrastructure, and charging stations for local government fleets. After one year of direct pay implementation, over 1,200 organizations, including 500 State and local governments, are already accessing these incentives. We are excited about these projects and the benefits that they will bring to our communities. However, as local leaders, we are concerned that repealing these tax credits would create economic uncertainty in our communities, as it would prevent us from accessing those important benefits. You know, I grew up to understand Republicans. Look, I didn't grow up as a Republican, but I did understand Republicans were for avoiding unintended consequences. Republicans were against radical change too quickly. Republicans wanted a solid business environment that people could rely upon. This is literally none of that. This is ideology manifesting itself as energy policy. And what is going to happen is people are going to lose their jobs and pay tons more for electricity. The Building Trades Unions called this bill ``the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country.'' And they go on: Simply put, it is the equivalent of terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL Pipeline projects. I have been here for a while. Keystone XL was a big deal to our friends in labor. I had some very tough conversations with my friends in labor about how important that project was to them and how it was in tension with some of our climate goals. But listen to what they say: It is the equivalent of terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL Pipeline projects. These guys are not me or Jeff Merkley or Eddie Markey or Sheldon Whitehouse or Martin Heinrich or Representative Ocasio-Cortez or any climate advocate. This is the Building Trades Unions. They are saying this is the biggest job killer, perhaps, in American history. We actually don't have to do this. The impetus behind this bill was essentially border spending and preventing the Trump tax cuts from expiring. And then a bunch of stuff got added on because that is what happens. We were there for our own version of this--our own BBB, our own Build Back Better--and everybody in your party piles on with something new. Then, the thing becomes a really challenging thing to pass because everybody has their hobbyhorse. And somebody's hobbyhorse is not just to have an all-of-the-above energy strategy, but to go out of your way to kill clean energy. It doesn't matter that it is going to raise prices. It doesn't matter that it is going to kill jobs. People at all levels in the public and private sectors, across the political spectrum, are all saying the same thing, which is: This is a bad bill for regular people, for the economy, and for the planet. One of the great things about our climate bill was that it made what was good for the planet also good for the economy. Clean energy became imminently profitable for businesses and widely accessible to consumers. And we made a choice there because some in our party didn't like the basic premise. They were attached to the idea of personal, political, and economic sacrifice because the planet is in peril. And I understand that instinct. I understand that instinct. But we paved a new path, and we decided--look--there is enough technology out there. There are abundant energy sources out there that we can actually solve our planetary crisis and create jobs and lower prices. And we can do it in such a way that blue States and red States, urban, rural, suburban all benefit. Republicans are on the verge of undoing all of that, even though it will hurt their constituents. In doing so, they will virtually guarantee China's dominance in clean energy, for decades to come, because if you are China, you cannot believe your luck. Your biggest competitor is willingly forfeiting the fight over who controls the energy technologies of the future because Donald Trump is too busy trying to get us back to the preindustrial age. This is the worst piece of legislation for the planet in the history of our country, and it is not even close. Republicans are effectively codifying Big Oil's wish list into law without exception. They are killing clean energy. They are subsidizing coal. They are dramatically expanding oil and gas leasing. They are purposefully jacking up energy prices and creating shortages--and creating shortages. And for what? Partially, it is to find enough savings to funnel tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars into the pockets of individual billionaires. But even kicking more than 16 million people off of healthcare coverage, denying food to the poor, and adding almost $5 trillion to the national debt was not enough. People voted for Donald Trump for all sorts of reasons. But no one voted for higher energy bills. No one voted for more frequent blackouts and brownouts and dirtier air or water. No one, whether you are a Democrat or Republican or Independent, wants that. I want to be clear. This fight is far from over. This fight over this bill is far from over. But even if this bill passes, it will set us back. But the fight for the planet is bigger than any one bill or vote, and that includes the big climate bill that we passed in the previous administration. And as any movement that has successfully mobilized and made changes knows, progress is not linear. Progress always has setbacks and frustrations, and progress is not assured. States like Hawaii will continue to do everything that they can to protect our environment, and the rest of the world will move on without us because doing nothing in the face of this worsening crisis is simply not an option. Make no mistake, what Congress is doing today will cost all of us in the years and decades to come. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, more than 16 million people are going to lose their healthcare, and tens of millions of Americans are going to pay more for healthcare every month. Hundreds of rural hospitals are going to be forced to close, and we are going to plunge the country into trillions of dollars of new debt. Now, what is this all for? Is it to improve our schools and roads? Is it to make housing and childcare more affordable? Is it because we are in the middle of a crisis that just has to be paid for or we are going to pay down the national debt? No. It is none of those things. It is because they want to cut taxes for the richest people to ever exist. And if that means you can't see your doctor or you have to pay hundreds of dollars more every month to pay for your healthcare, tough luck. Now, here is the thing: Republicans actually know what they are walking into because people in their own States are telling them what is about to happen. ``We can't sustain serving our community the way we are with these cuts,'' one hospital leader in Kansas said. A health executive in Texas wrote: Cutting billions of dollars from [Medicaid] would have widespread and devastating consequences for Texans. Beyond the obvious impacts to people enrolled in the program, the collateral damage of program cuts will be felt across the board. Hospitals will do everything they can to weather the storm, but some may not survive. Others will have to increase their reliance on state or local support or reduce services. Access to care will decrease, especially for high-cost service lines like maternal [health] care and behavioral health. Jobs will be lost. The impact on communities--which rely on their hospitals for employment and growth--will be profound. A Utah father who credited Medicaid with saving his own son's life said: Without Medicaid, these life-saving treatments would have been financially impossible. There is absolutely no way we would have covered the cost on our own. . . . And in this way, our story is not unique. So many families insured by Medicaid could have to make difficult, life-altering decisions if Congress slashes funding. A former Republican elected official in Georgia warned: Cuts to Medicaid are not only fiscally irresponsible, but they could threaten the livelihoods of our fellow Georgians and the economic opportunities that consistently make our great state a top state for business. So the stakes are clear: It is people's health. It is people's hard- earned money. It is people's lives. And whether you are in a red or a blue State, you will absolutely feel the weight of this terrible piece of legislation. More than a quarter of nursing homes may close. Hundreds of rural hospitals will shutter. And for what? To pay down the debt because we are a nation at war, because we want to invest in infrastructure or schools or healthcare? No. The reason they are making these cuts to food assistance, the reason they are making these cuts to rural hospitals, the reason they are making these cuts so that people are going to have to pay several hundred dollars more per month for their own healthcare is to create enough revenue for the biggest tax cut, the biggest wealth transfer from working people to wealthy people in the history of the United States of America. Even if you are not on Medicaid yourself, you likely know someone who is--a friend, a neighbor, a relative, a coworker. And, more than that, kicking tons of people in your community off of healthcare will drive up costs for everybody else and make high-quality care hard to find. You are going to pay more for less care--all for the biggest tax cut in American history for the people who need it the least. I have no problem with the people who need it the least. But the truth is, they need it the least. If you are financially successful and you make $4 million a year, God bless. That is the American dream. It does not mean you need a tax cut, and it does not mean you need a tax cut paid for by reducing services, especially in rural communities. The good news is this: We actually don't have to do this. There is no rush to do this. There is no clamoring among constituents in red or blue States to do this. This is an add-on. What they want to do is extend the original tax cuts. I opposed those tax cuts, but I can understand that Republicans, as an article of faith, want to extend the tax cuts that their President enacted two terms ago--fair enough--good, solid, old-fashioned policy disagreements. But then they just larded it up with stuff--giveaways to special interests, and cuts and cuts and cuts to things that people care about--left, right, and center. We don't actually have to do it this way. You are going to pay more for less care, all so that billionaires have a little more money sitting in their accounts. It is going to require four Republicans saying: Enough is enough. I have heard a number of my Republican colleagues talk about how essential Medicaid is to their rural communities. And it is not just the people who are on Medicaid. Obviously, those are the people you have to be primarily concerned with. But a lot of us go home and visit both urban and rural hospitals, and they all say the same thing, which is that, if you blow out 30 percent of your revenue, you can't function as an institution. So it is not just a question of whether you personally are on Medicaid or you personally care about Medicaid. It is about: Does your rural hospital even survive after this bill is enacted? Nobody wants this, and there is still time to kill this bill. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I have given a lot of speeches on this floor, and this is the least prepared but the most clear I ever will be: This is the stuff of dictatorships. It is actually happening. A U.S. Senator was manhandled, shoved to the ground, and cuffed. He identified himself: I am Senator Alex Padilla. That should be enough. That should be enough. A U.S. Senator who is, by the way, protected by the speech and debate clause of the Constitution of the United States and a specific statute that allows him to oversee immigration facilities, and he says: I am a Senator, and I have a question. To Chris Murphy's point, they said, well, he was being disrespectful. Being disrespectful is legal. Being disrespectful is American. Being disruptive is OK if it is just using your words and not your body. This is the stuff of dictatorships. And the thing that is making me most terrified is I see zero Republicans, except for the Presiding Officer, in this Chamber. And I understand, if it is not a member of your own party, you want some context. There is no context that justifies this action. Alex Padilla is not required to be impeccable in every single way in order to exercise his responsibilities as an American and as one of the two that represents California in the U.S. Senate. This is the stuff of dictatorships. One of the officers who throws him to the ground as he is clearly complying, cuffs him face down on the carpet, and they say: There is no recording in here. It is a damn press conference. It is for recording. They didn't want to hear his speaking. And if the internet has got it accurately, the Secretary was there and delivering her remarks within earshot the whole time. She has command authority over those agents who are arresting a leader in the legislative branch. This is not something on the internet for us to argue about. We all know what we saw. We all know what we saw. I remain hopeful that Leader Thune and other Republicans can walk us back from the brink, but I am not so sure anymore. So as Trump's Department of Homeland Security raises the stakes and continues with a series of provocations to justify increasingly authoritarian actions, we have two obligations. One is to establish that as a legislative branch, we are not going to stand for this. And the other is those people who are peacefully protesting: Be very disciplined this weekend. Be very peaceful this weekend. If we are going to win, we need to maintain the high ground. And I don't mean we blue; we Democrats. I mean we Americans who believe in this system of government. I have never, ever--other than January 6-- been so outraged at the conduct of an administration. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, if you heard the leader of a foreign country was sending armed soldiers into his own cities, you would correctly call it authoritarian behavior. If you heard them say that the bar for unleashing troops on their own civilians is ``What I think it is,'' you would put them in a long line of dictators throughout history and the world. The fact that this is happening right here in the United States against fellow citizens at the direction of the President does not make it less dangerous.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. I ask for the yeas and nays.